Emotional Intelligence : How Important EQ at Work?

"If your actions inspires others to dream more, learn more,

 do more and become more, you are a leader"

- John Quincy Adams -

Emotional Intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage your emotions. The skills involved in emotional intelligence are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. Recently, it has become a bit of a buzz word in human resources departments across the globe but researchers are saying that it is the time emotional intelligence be taken seriously.

In this article, I would like to write about some questions that may come up from workplace, and how EQ will help people to deal with those problems, such as :

1. Sometimes, we are facing a bad day at work because of some personal matter, how we deal with that?

Firstly, we should identify what kind of personal matter it is, and from who it comes? It is ours, or theirs? Because when we talking about workplace it should be done professionally and not allowed personal matters involved. This is a time to practice our self-awareness. 

Self-awareness is a skill that you need to recognize your own emotional response to any  interactions. You should understand your strengths and weaknesses and how they affect to your thought and behaviour. Your responses can be easily affect the way other respond. 

If the problem come from your colleague or your boss, so take a time to be calm and think. Is that problem matters to your own work or not? To be calm and think for a few seconds will help you to identify your emotion before you give reaction to those problems.

If the problems come from yourself, I suggest you to make the priority list. If it couldn't be solved now, just don't put it on the top of your priority list to do today. Focus to what you should do at work first. 

2. When we feel unmotivated, what we do to overcome it and how to make ourselves become more motivated again?

Many things can be a reason to make someone feel unmotivated. I would like to see this matter from two ways, from perspective of self-awareness and the second one is perspective of independency. Self-awareness means you can recognize your feeling, your emotion, your mood, your strengths and your weaknesses. This ability to know why you feel unmotivated. Try to sense it and become aware of that feeling. When you become aware of that feeling, I'm pretty sure you could manage it. 

One of the ways to solve it come from perspective independence. Independence is the ability to be self-directed and self-controlled in your thinking and actions and to be free of emotional dependency. Independent people are self-reliant in planning and making important decisions.

Your feeling whatever it is, should be free of emotional dependency. Be independence means don't let anyone ruin your emotions, by keep focusing to your goals. It gives impact to your motivation at work. 

Another way to make ourselves become more motivated again, is trying to find someone who has similar with your process that you are going to be. Identify clearly how they get their goals by follow its process. Maybe it is not 100% same as your project that you do, but at least you have the positive spirit from their stories. Read or listen to the success story from someone else, could be motivate ourselves too.

3. How to build healthy working environment among your colleagues and make them feel happy to work together with you?

If you are a leader in the organisation, you will face many different people with different personality and behaviours. Some of them are diligent, passionate, discipline and have strong commitment to their work, and the other side there are some of them are lazy, less creativity and unmotivated, which are they only work when being asked. 

Your role is to motivate them by being a role model, get them involved to the project together with you. Give appreciation if they reach the goals or accomplish their work even though it is a very small one. And give advices nicely if there's something to be corrected or revised on the project. Your colleague will respond it positively to what you've done to them. It develops strong commitment to work together to get your ultimate goals. 

The leaders with high Emotional Intelligence have ability to communicate their feelings and thoughts to their colleagues. They also have empathy. They recognize other's feeling and know how to respond it. Communication skills are not only the ability to deliver your messages, but also the ability to listen to others.

Be a leader means you create more leaders, not create many followers. Motivate your colleagues, being assertive in making a right decisions properly to the problems,  give the right respond  to others, build a trust among the workers, is the best way to build healthy workplace environment.

4. Have you ever had to change your behaviour, either at work or home, if so, why did you have to change, and how did you change?

First of all we should know what our personality is. When we know what is type of our personality, it helps us "predict" the likelihood of certain behaviour occuring from the environment, either at work or home. You will find out different way to talk with different people in different situations.

DISC is a personality model based on the work of psychologist William Marston.  Marston found that observable behavioural characteristics can be grouped into four major personality types.  Each behavioural type tends to exhibit specific characteristics.

DISC itself is purely an acronym for the four personality types which are:

• Dominance  – which relates to control, power and assertiveness
• Influence – which relates to social situations and communication
• Steadiness – which relates to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness
• Compliance – which relates to structure and organisation 

Here are some guidelines for successful interaction…

With Dominant people

• Build respect to avoid conflict
• Focus on facts and ideas rather than people
• Have evidence to support your ideas and advice
• Be quick, focused and get to the point
• Ask 'what' not 'how'
• Talk about how problems will hinder accomplishments
• Show them how they can succeed

 

With Influential people

• Be social and friendly with them
• Listen to them talk about their ideas
• Help them find ways to translate the talk into useful action
• Don’t spend too much time on the details
• Motivate them to follow through to complete tasks
• Recognise their accomplishments

 

With Steady people

• Be genuinely interested in them
• Create a human working environment for them
• Give them time to adjust to change
• Clearly define goals for them and provide ongoing support
• Recognise and appreciate their achievements
• Avoid hurry and pressure
• Present new ideas carefully

 

With Compliant people

• Warn them before and generally avoid surprises
• Be well prepared. Don't ad-lib with them if you can help it
• Be logical, accurate and use clear data
• Show how things fit into the bigger picture
• Be specific in disagreement and focus on the facts
• Be patient, persistent and diplomatic