Why we need to work on Emotional Intelligence to be a good communicator?

Any business and almost any career require an ability to communicate successfully with other people. When you expand the work environment to a global level, it requires extra special communication skills in order to succeed in business as a leader.  As Moran, Abramson, and Moran (2014) indicate, to increase the effectiveness across the cultures, training must be the focus for the leaders. Good education, high IQ score is no longer good enough to be a leader I was told by my manager recently, on the 2017 performance evaluation he actually asked me to work on my emotional intelligence.

Consistently providing beyond the expected performance is great but he pulled out some of my emails for an example to explain why I needed to work on my emotional intelligence. He said “when you encode your emails they are very direct and precise to me but your peers are taking that like an order from you. So, when you want to make an offer for help put yourself in their shoes. Imagine not being part of the email chain with the Global team all the time like you. So, when you compose your emails if they are related to them make sure encode it with empathy so that they can decode it feeling like they are being empowered by you. This is going to be your growth plan this year, the only requirement I want from you especially now that you are working on a global scale”.

Although English is not my native language, it is the international language of commerce, in order to conduct a successful business across the continents, just like the global leaders, I need to develop emotional intelligence in order to conduct a successful business.  Whether they like to or not, leaders are in charge of managing the mood of their organizations. When the organization in the global level, maintaining the mood and communication can be even more challenging. Therefore, the leaders have to improve their emotional intelligence.

Where does Emotional Intelligence come from? And why it has become a key element in effective Global Communication. John D. Mayer (2004) defined Emotional Intelligence in HBR article that “From a scientific (rather than a popular) standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships, and to manage your own and others’ emotions. It doesn’t necessarily include the qualities (like optimism, initiative, and self-confidence) that some popular definitions ascribe to it”.

According to Coleman, there are five key elements that constitute into emotional intelligence that leaders must have.  Those are; self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills (Moran, Abramson, and Moran, 2014).  When a leader combines those skills into their existing intelligence level, they can become a more globally well rounded skillful leader. Certainly, in a world that where most of the communications are composed electronically, emotional intelligence becomes a key factor in understanding self and others. Unlike IQ, emotional intelligence requires a lifelong learning.

Personally, every leader whether they have been in a leadership role long enough or not should invest their personal effort to improve their emotional intelligence. Once they learn to adapt, they will be able to see others from a different perspective, negotiate better and certainly empathize others.

References:

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences (Ninth ed.). New York: Routledge.

Ovans, Andrea (2015) Harvard Business Review.  How Emotional Intelligence Became a Key Leadership Skill. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/04/how-emotional-intelligence-became-a-key-leadership-skill on February 1, 2018.