How emotionally intelligent are you at work?

Only 36% of us have the ability to identify emotions

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify and recognize emotions in yourself and others.

But how do you know if you’re emotionally intelligent?

The starting point for EQ is self-awareness. Self-awareness is an INTRApersonal skill, meaning it is a skill that exists within oneself. As humans we commonly experience emotions like anger, frustration and anxiety, and joy. We recognize, or don’t recognize, our own emotions. Self-awareness is both the ability to know ourselves as well as the ability to understand how others view us.

How we handle our emotions is the next pillar of EQ. When we get upset at work, do we throw a tantrum like a toddler? Or do we self-manage and respond professionally? As those emotions flow through us, we do our best to control our impulses and actions. Unless we snap like Milton from Office Space, we are always modulating our reactions to our emotions.

When your co-worker sends out a nasty email criticizing your work in front of your entire team, do you type out an expletive filled, angry email and reply all? Or, are you emotionally intelligent enough to step away from email, take a walk around the block, blow off some steam, and later calmly speak directly with your co-worker about their email?

Anecdotally, we’ve recently run two Emotional Intelligence workshops where we had attendees estimate their own EQ. We asked attendees “How strong were you with handling emotions at work before the session?” (on a scale of 1–10, 1 is extremely weak, 10 is extremely strong).

People usually overestimate their own EQ skills. I observed that the majority of attendees were really struggling with identifying and dealing with emotions in the workplace. Many attendees said that they had never really talked about emotions at work before. Younger, less experienced attendees with fewer life experiences were especially lost.

Yet when we looked at how attendees rated their own EQ, they rated themselves at an average score of 6.6 out of 10.

In the book, “Emotional Intelligence. Why it can matter more than IQ,” Daniel Goleman stresses that “at the very highest levels, competence models for leadership typically consist of anywhere from 80–100% EI-based abilities. As the head of research at a global executive search firm put it ‘CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise, and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.’”

When it comes to improving your emotional intelligence, humility is critical. Even the ‘experts’ who teach Emotional Intelligence would tell you that being an EQ instructor doesn’t mean they are masters of handling emotions. We all struggle with emotions on a daily basis. We can all learn (and relearn) important emotional intelligence skills that empower us to be more capable teammates. We are human, after all.

Related posts:

Decided to start and publish to a blog once a day to hold myself accountable to my entrepreneurial dreams. Today on the commute I read some random algorithm (new material instead of reading bloated…

React 18 was released on March 8, 2022, with new updates, and improvements. The most important update is the Concurrent rendering model, It is a foundational update to React’s core rendering model…

and all you have to do is customize it according to your business. This would be better than creating an app from scratch. These are some of the things that I can think about. Ubereats clone apps…