Nowadays, profiles with a high level of empathy, a good ability to communicate, influence, to adapt are the most sought after in the professional field. It’s very advisable to be aware of the importance of emotional intelligence at work because emotional intelligence is presented as one of the most reliable indicators of future success. In this sense, one might ask: What are the benefits of emotional intelligence in the professional field? How to develop your emotional intelligence at work? How to put emotional intelligence at the service of Leadership? These are the questions that will be the subject of this article entitled: the importance of emotional intelligence at work.
It must be said that with all the transformations related to digitization, robotization, emotional intelligence, which are accompanied by a gradual disappearance of many professions, many consider it our ability to feel and breathe emotions in what we do and our relationship to others that will maintain our added value in the face of machines.
In 1990, two American researchers, Peter Salovey and John Mayer introduced the term “emotional intelligence”. Then in 1995, Daniel Goleman, American psychologist pioneer of positive psychology, popularized it in his eponymous book.
According to him, emotional intelligence is “the ability to regulate one’s emotions and those of others, to distinguish them and to use that information to guide one’s thoughts and actions.”
In short, having good emotional intelligence means being able to recognize, welcome, listen to and decode emotions at home and in others and use them as levers to adjust your behavior in response. The importance of emotional intelligence at work manifests on an intrapersonal and interpersonal level.
Five Components Which Describe the Importance of Emotional Intelligence at Work Defined by Daniel Goleman:
Self-awareness:
Being connected to your feelings and intuition, recognizing when you feel an emotion, knowing how to listen to it, name it, understand it … It’s about having a look and listening to our emotions. To know oneself is also to demonstrate self-awareness.
Self-control:
The ability to control one’s reactions to emotions, one’s impulses, to make thoughtful choices. Adapt to changes. Know how to bounce back after a failure. To have control of oneself is to know how to manage one’s emotions, good management for a better orientation of one’s emotions. You must be masters of your emotions and not your emotions master of you.
Internal motivation:
Cultivate envy, enthusiasm, develop enthusiasm, and meet new challenges. Grow the rage of conquering and moving forward in life. Maintain determination in your daily life.
Empathy:
To look at others, to listen to them with kindness, to recognize emotions through even weak signals, to welcome them, to accept them, to understand their needs, their points of view, to avoid judging them. It is showing understanding and acceptance of the other without acceptance or judgment.
Social interaction:
Developing leadership, building strong and trusting relationships, communicating and communicating, supporting others in their development. Contribute to the development of the emotional well-being of others.
Developing your emotional intelligence is not intended to “control” your emotions but, on the contrary, to open the door, to make room for them to prevent them from controlling us. A developed emotional intelligence allows you to better live your emotions, without choking them but while controlling their impact on us and using them to our advantage (motivation, social skills …). If we know better develop and manage our emotions, it is a psychological asset so much sought after in the professional field.
Did you know? It is helpful to cultivate emotional intelligence in the professional field. Whoever serves to listen to his emotions and make good use of them will not only contribute to his personal well-being but also to his professional well-being. It is your job to know how to take advantage of your emotional intelligence to make a difference at work. It is your job to recognize the importance of emotional intelligence at work.
I – What Are the Benefits of Good Emotional Intelligence at Work?
Emotional intelligence is now presented as one of the keys to success, especially among the mandatory managerial skills. According to Daniel Goleman, our level of emotional intelligence largely explains our performance at work. A person with excellent emotional intelligence can even outperform a person with a higher IQ but a lower IE.
*** Individual Benefits
– Leave room for emotions allows you to better live your daily life by improving the management of stress, creativity, attention, problem-solving, daring …
– Listening to your emotions helps you to know yourself better, to align your values and actions. Emotional intelligence thus promotes overall well-being and self-confidence.
– Those who have high emotional intelligence are better armed with transformations. They are resilient and adapt with agility.
*** Collective Benefits
– Good emotional intelligence is also a great asset. It helps to foster a healthier and more serene relationship with colleagues.
– It greatly facilitates communication, collaboration, cohesion, good atmosphere.
– It allows a respectful work environment and opens the door to authenticity.
When we make the effort to understand what the other feels, we often find that it does not seek to harm us, that it has its own needs to fulfill, and that the tensions come from the contradiction between its needs and ours.
Good emotional intelligence allows you to put yourself in each other’s shoes while keeping a distance and helps to defuse tension. Without avoiding them, it makes disputes and debates more constructive.
When one knows how to express one’s emotions appropriately, one gives oneself more chances than the other one hears them, understands them, and accepts them. Knowing how to decipher the emotions of others can also capture their moods and expectations and learn to choose, for example, the right time to apply.
II – How to Develop Your Emotional Intelligence at Work?
One cannot develop one’s emotional intelligence unless one works on one’s self-awareness, self-control, inner motivation, empathy, and social interaction. These components are highly involved and are essential to developing our emotional intelligence in the professional field.
However, it should be noted that for some people, it is primarily a matter of lifting the brakes that prevent them from making room for emotions, because they have been deaf for too long and they have lost the capacity to listen to them.
While in others, It is about training to recognize and understand the different emotions. What one feels is often an interlacing of plural emotions rather than a single well-defined emotion and unraveling the ball to fully understand what it contains is not always easy.
All in All, to Cultivate Emotional Intelligence, Several Solutions Exist
– For starters, training catalogs on the subject are expanding and more and more companies are offering them to their employees.
– To learn how to feel, recognize and name the emotions that pass through us, we can simply rely on lists of emotions that exist and that allow acquiring a more pointed vocabulary to put specific words on them.
– We can also work on attention, turning inward to listen to what is happening in our body and our head. The practice of mindfulness allows in particular to accommodate the emotions, without judging them, and to put words more easily to decide how to act.
– The practice of active listening can, in turn, help develop empathy, to turn to the other. Nonviolent Communication can help express your emotions appropriately.
– Finally, coaching allows you to work on targeted aspects of emotional intelligence. Cognitive-behavioral therapy can also be effective in developing it.
Need coaching to boost emotional intelligence? Thank you for taking note of this contact:
Thomson Coaching
www.thomsondablemond.info
Thomson.dablemond@gmail.com
+225 08 43 79 34
Thomson Dablemond.
III – How to Put Emotional Intelligence at the Service of Leadership?
We evolve in a professional world that is becoming more and more complex to the point that for good management the leaders must cultivate and practice emotional intelligence.
The dehumanization of modes of organization and industrial relations plays a great role in disengagement and ill-being at work. Putting emotions back at the heart of management is one way of dealing with them.
Let the leaders listen to the emotions of others: they need empathy for employees. The better we listen to our people, the easier it will be to guide our management. Good management takes into account the emotional aspect. Because the emotions of your employees have an impact on their performance and commitment within the company.
Increasingly, emotional intelligence is considered an indispensable attribute of a good leader. He must be able to handle both his own emotions and those of others. He must be able to decode the emotional states of his teams, take the temperature of their emotional weather and adapt his management accordingly.
Good emotional intelligence allows leaders to pay close attention to their employees, to spread goodwill and recognition. Capable of sharing their doubts and fears, of admitting their weaknesses, of keeping their cool in the face of problems, and of making the necessary decisions, these leaders motivate, reassure, inspire trust, and reinforce cohesion. They give their team a sense of security conducive to learning, risk-taking, and daring.