It is not always easy to be emotionally connected to others or even yourself. When it comes to satisfaction and success in our relationships, career goals, and personal goals emotional intelligence is important. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and express emotions, to use emotions to facilitate thinking, to understand and reason with emotions to effectively manage emotions within oneself and in relationships with others (Northouse, 2016). Emotional intelligence is a learned behavior so it can be developed and improved once when one is aware of it. Two competencies of emotional intelligence that will help one to operate effectively as a leader are awareness and management.
Emotional intelligence positively impacts your self-esteem, your physical health, your job performance, and the quality of your relationship (Gray, 2016). Being aware of what makes you have positive and negative feelings are important to identify because you want to have control over the actions that cause positive and negative feelings. In your organization if procrastination causes you to stress out then you would want to avoid waiting until the last minute to get tasks done. If you are proud when your followers are awarded for their hard-work, then you will continue motivating and guiding them to do their best. If your followers are continuously being recognized, then you will continue to be proud of their accomplishments.
Awareness is the first step of change. Emotions control your thinking, behavior, and actions. Not being aware of your emotions can cause physical and mental issues. Having emotions are normal but not recognizing your emotions could affect you and your followers. If your followers’ tardiness upset you then you must be able to identify that the tardiness is the reason that you are upset. Then you must address the issue rather than act as though there is no issue with your follower’s actions. Now that you are aware and have made your followers aware of your dislike, you can press on with having an effective workplace.
Not only will you need to be aware of your likes and dislikes, you will also need to be aware of your followers’ likes and dislikes as well. If you are not aware that your followers’ are dissatisfied with their current assignment then you will not understand why their production level is decreasing. If you address the individuals’ production and how they are no longer meeting the standards, then they are able to inform you why they are producing less than usual. By addressing the issue, it will lead to your follower’s being honest with you regarding their frustrations of their current assignment. Now that you are aware, you are better able to understand where your followers are coming from. You will be in a better position to work to improve the followers’ assignment in order to increase their job satisfaction.
Now that you are aware of your emotions and your followers’ emotions, you have to understand how to manage those emotions. Anger can be managed by switching thoughts, having fun, exercising, defining the problem, and focusing on others. If you know there are situations that will cause you to get upset then you either avoid them or face the situations that upset you and find a way to deal with them. In my current job it frustrates me when my boss constantly puts his needs before his personnel’s needs. It is always about him. As a leader within my organization what I do to combat those frustrations is to provide alternative options for my boss and to give him reasons on why those alternative options will work best for our organization and not just for him.
Having open communication will help manage emotions if you have an issue with someone. We are all human and not everything will be positive or negative. The way you deal with those positives and negatives is the key to our emotional intelligence. Being aware of your emotions and the people that you lead emotions are important to being able to manage those emotions. If there are actions that I am displeased with, I should not suppress them, I should face them so that they will not hinder me from moving on to manage those actions. Once you are able to be aware of those actions we will be able to make adjustments.
References:
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Gray, J. (2016). 5 Practical Ways To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence -. Retrieved from https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/5-practical-ways-increase-emotional-intelligence-jgc/