Leaders, like everyone else, are facing new challenges and learning to adapt in these uncertain times. Emotional intelligence is more important now than ever before.
Engaging key Emotional Intelligence (EI) components helps leaders effectively address and manage their own emotional state and their interactions with others. Leaders can leverage their EI strengths to handle the unique challenges they are facing.
The top EI areas to embrace when leading in times of uncertainty:
Empathy
Emotional Self-Awareness
Interpersonal Relationships
Enhancing these EI skills through practice and self-awareness strengthens a leader’s ability to build trust, encourage and motivate teams, sustain team productivity and internally improve feelings of wellbeing. It is important to note that EI is about how you feel and how you are experienced by others.
How do you assess your strengths in the EI components listed above? It starts with being aware of yourself, your actions and your feelings. It includes being aware of the effect you have on others, in virtual and live environments. This awareness will provide clues (if you don’t already know) about where you should focus your development.
To level up your leadership impact in times of uncertainty: Focus on enhancing these 3 high- impact areas of EI - Empathy, Emotional Self-Awareness, and Interpersonal Relationships. Concentrate on one of these EI elements at a time, and as you feel more confident with that EI area, move on to the next.
Developing Empathy: Focus your attention on others and seek to understand how their emotions and actions make sense from their point of view. One thing you can do to increase your demonstration of empathy is to use statements that follow the formula of Fact and Feeling. Such as “The conflict with the customer (fact) sounds very frustrating (feeling)”. This lets the person know you understand and opens the door for them to continue sharing with you.
Developing Emotional Self-Awareness: Think about how your emotions influence decisions you make and the way you carry out those decisions, observe which emotions help or hinder your job performance, and think about how your emotions affect others. This reflection, as a practice, will help you understand and then fine tune and adjust the way you react when emotion is involved.
Developing Interpersonal Relationships: Think about how relationships impact you at work. Has an interpersonal relationship ever made making a decision or getting something done more difficult? Identify a relationship that if improved would help you or your team to meet objectives. Utilizing Empathy and Emotional Self-Awareness, look at the situation from the perspective of the other person and attentively listen to them. Plan for, and carry out, ways to improve this relationship.
Leading in uncertain times is especially challenging. Team members may be struggling and demands do not subside. Tapping into these 3 EI areas is a great start to becoming a more Emotionally Intelligent leader.