There has been a lot of talk about emotional intelligence as an important leadership trait recently, but it’s important to dig into what emotional intelligence really means and why cultivating it on an institutional scale is vital for business success.
Practicing emotional intelligence can help us recognize our blind spots and learn how we need to transform on either a personal or professional level. However, emotional intelligence can be difficult to teach and encourage. How, for instance, can you promote emotional intelligence across your entire organization?
Here, we’ll explore what emotional intelligence means, why it’s vital, and how you can embrace it on a large scale to support yourself, your customers, and your employees, regardless of industry.
What Exactly Is Emotional Intelligence and Why Does It Matter?
There are many different types of intelligence. Emotional intelligence can be one of the hardest to teach. This is because we all practice different levels of emotional intelligence all the time in our day-to-day lives. By emotional intelligence, we mean the ability to understand, read, and adapt to the feelings and personalities in a room or in the environment around you. Honing your emotional intelligence is key to your ongoing success in a diverse and increasingly virtual work environment.
Without emotional intelligence, you may find it more difficult to successfully navigate Zoom meetings, Slack messages, and limited face-to-face time that comes with the world of remote work. But, improving emotional intelligence is crucial. In fact, 62% of business leaders believe that emotional intelligence is more important in the workplace than it was before the pandemic. We all have our own stressors and concerns that we deal with each day. Workplace efficiency requires that we are aware of others and tactful in the way we interact to help everyone do their best.
Emotional intelligence is vital to leadership during times of change and transformation. Fifty-seven percent of employees report leaving a job because of a manager, a statistic that demonstrates the importance of emotionally intelligent leaders and workplaces. When an organization fails to promote understanding and empathy through an emotionally intelligent culture, problems occur that negatively affect workers and the workplace overall.
We are amid a serious labor shortage that is affecting many service industries. Taking your management skills to the next level is one of the best ways to enhance employee retention. This means improving your ability to communicate and foster strong peer relationships.
But how can you go about promoting emotional intelligence across your entire organization?
Embracing Emotional Intelligence on a Large Scale
For any organization to work, there has to be a level of individual recognition and a commitment toward mutual success. Like organizational confidence, emotional intelligence has to begin at the personal level and extend outward. Good leaders can help teams formulate a cyclical and self reaffirming culture of emotional intelligence that will, in turn, drive success.
Regardless of what kind of organization you operate, or what your business model is, emotional intelligence plays an important role in your ability to adapt to economic conditions. Here are just a few suggestions for how you can better embrace emotional intelligence on a large scale:
- Offer social mindfulness and communication training. Often, exercises designed to help groups recognize how they react and communicate with one another can help build emotional intelligence. Encourage open-mindedness and other perspectives as you navigate awareness training.
- Commit to a culture of empathy. Empathy is key to a thriving, emotionally intelligent workplace. Make empathy a staple of your company values and ensure those values are reinforced in an environment in which every worker feels heard.
- Encourage praise. This simple item often goes neglected. People are more open to critique and recommendations if first recognized for what they did well. Additionally, a workplace that encourages praise is one in which more workers feel recognized for their achievements, leading them to work even harder.
- Make sure everyone has a chance to speak. Meetings can get crowded and noisy, but it’s important to exemplify emotional intelligence across your organization by giving everyone room to speak. This means offering up the floor and preventing others from talking over their coworkers.
- Encourage open feedback and innovation. An emotionally intelligent team is trusting and respectful of one another. To get there, you need a free flow of ideas, an environment that is open to those ideas, and a workflow agile enough to support innovation. Start by creating a workplace that invites consistent feedback and suggestions.
These are just a few of the ways you might go about cultivating a more emotionally intelligent culture and organization. Since establishing emotional intelligence will play a huge role in your overall success, it’s in your best interest to start as early as possible.
The economy suffers from the ongoing effects of a global pandemic and a rapid shift to remote work, virtual customer experiences, and contactless business processes. During all this change, workers face more concerns on an already loaded plate. To secure your efficiency and adaptability, your entire organization needs to learn how to become more emotionally intelligent. Start by building a culture of empathy, praise, and recognition, and watch your organization transform. After all, the best investment you can make is an investment in your people.
