Emotional intelligence isn’t just a new buzzword that’s being thrown around in business. It’s an important aspect of a person’s personality related to how you deal with emotions, and organizations realize how vital the quality is for employees. Hiring employees, and especially leaders that are very emotionally intelligent will help your business succeed in more ways than one.
Emotionally intelligent leaders help to increase your company’s bottom line. According to the Huffington Post, “Pepsi found that executives with high EQs generated 10% more productivity, had 87% less turnover, brought $3.75M more value to the company, and increased ROI by 1000%.” A Keller Center Research study found that leaders who didn’t receive any EQ training missed performance targets by 15 percent.
Having emotionally intelligent employees also helps companies recruit and retain employees. Emotionally intelligent people form better relationships with their co-workers and leaders and perform better in their role. This leads to higher job satisfaction, which affects the company churn rate.
Understanding the importance of emotional intelligence is the first step to increasing your EQ. Knowing and wanting to change is half of the battle. To start your journey of improving your emotional intelligence, ask yourself the following three questions.
How do I see myself, versus how do others see me?
To increase your emotional intelligence, you first need to understand how different your perception of yourself is from your reputation. It can be challenging to see how we express our emotions and how we understand the feelings of others. Because emotional intelligence cannot be represented as a good or bad score, it can be hard to determine where yours lies. The best way to learn how others view your emotional intelligence is to solicit advice through a 360-degree feedback assessment.
What matters the most to me?
You can use the received feedback to determine what areas need to improve, but you can also consider the areas that feel the most important to you. Only wanting to improve on a particular skill because your boss or someone else told you that you should will only hurt you on your path to becoming more emotionally intelligent. Your emotional intelligence is closely entwined with yourself so how motivated you are to learn something makes all the difference.
What changes can I make to reach my goals?
Once you’re aware of the areas that you want to improve, you can identify what steps you need to take to achieve those goals. Keep the steps specific and measurable so you can track your progress. Practice your skills whenever possible; don’t only try to improve them at work, keep up with the goals at home too.