Emotional intelligence (EI) is an important soft skill that must be learned and cultivated for managing emotions and occurrences, especially unpalatable ones, in all communication settings. You need it for managing your emotions while interacting with your friends and even family. And if you work for a company or own your own business, you will need it, even more, to understand your emotions and that of others at your workplace to drive effective work performance.
There are always situations of conflict and tight spots at the workplace, but you can get the best out of them if you understand how your emotional intelligence comes into play. Hence, this article will show you the role of EI in the workplace, and how you can use it to cultivate self-awareness and build stronger connections.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EI) is being able to recognise and understand one’s emotions and also perceive the emotions of others. It helps you to be self-aware about your emotions and also aware of the environment of people around you. Emotional intelligence is used in building interpersonal relationships at home, school, workplaces and other social gatherings.
It directly helps you to learn more about your feelings and simultaneously influences how you build relationships and connections with people too. If you are looking to strengthen your relationship with co-workers and colleagues, improving your emotional intelligence would help.
How Emotional Intelligence at Workplace Helps Build Self-Awareness and Stronger Connections
Emotional intelligence is useful in a lot of situations in workplaces. Below are some of the benefits it gives you as an employee at work.
- Self-awareness: Having good emotional intelligence leads you to get more conscious of your personality and feelings. You tend to be in the know about yourself and your emotions enough to make informed and rational decisions. Also, being emotionally intelligent helps you to express your emotions more correctly and reflect on the actions your feelings lead you to when necessary.
- Boosts leadership skill: If you are in the place of leading a team for projects, programs or events at your company, at some point you would need emotional intelligence. Directing and leading individuals with varying opinions, enthusiasm and perspectives to work is challenging and also tied to emotions. The way the team players feel about the work influences their work performance. Hence, you must know how to communicate and manage everyone for work success with proper emotional intelligence skills.
- Improve collaboration: As a team player in a workplace, you would eventually be charged to work closely with other team members on some tasks. This requires you to display good team working skills as you have claimed on your resume. You will be needing the emotional intelligence to manage your emotions properly to avoid dragging your work process with others. Being able to communicate promptly and adequately is tied to your level of emotional intelligence too.
For instance, you have a deadline to submit a task to your teammate on a project. And an emergency comes up along the line for you which automatically makes your deadline unachievable. You would need to sort out your emergency first and get to work later. In this case, it is proper for you to communicate the current situation that may make you miss your deadline to your teammates.
You may deem it unnecessary to inform them of your situation as you don’t want to burden them with your matters. But your emotional intelligence would signal you that this emergency may keep you out of contact with them when your deadline comes and it may get the team worried about your due deliverables.
Simultaneously, they can get anxious and mentally stressed for you not meeting up with the stipulated time. However, if you communicate with them, you can keep them in the loop and help them avoid unnecessary mental stress. And who knows, you might even get a hand for the task too. So, prioritise communication.
- Empathy building: Emotional intelligence allows you to consider the feelings of your colleagues at the workplace in certain situations. This helps you to understand why some people behave in some ways and others don’t. You can then easily interact with people knowing how they are emotionally different for better work relations.
- Conflict management: Humans are bound to get misunderstandings and the workplace is just another possible place conflict can happen among people. So, as inevitable as it is, there is a need for solutions to manage conflicts whenever they occur. Since it is a lot of emotions placed wrongly, the best way to handle it is with greater emotions management knowledge. And this is where emotional intelligence comes in. A good EI helps you sort through all emotions at play in a conflict to arrive at a good resolution.
These highlighted roles of emotional intelligence only lead back to one thing which is stronger connections with people, at your workplace and any other gathering you find yourself. Being able to manage conflict helps you strengthen your connection with concerned individuals. Also, having the ability and sense of responsibility to communicate with teammates even in your tight positions makes your colleagues trust and respect you more.
Hence, you must prioritise learning about emotional intelligence and putting it to use at your workplace. And if you are in search of more helpful articles on how to boost your productivity and build stronger relationships at work, visit our blog page today.
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