Posted by Nathalia Lopes on 07 Fevereiro, 2022
Emotional intelligence at work is a competence that makes all the difference in interpersonal relationships. Professionals can be intelligent in various areas of knowledge, but having mastery over their own emotions and those of others is a great differential.
Within companies, this competence has a decisive impact on organizational climate, culture and team productivity.
Next, we’ll understand how to apply emotional intelligence at work to improve performance and achieve career goals. Continue reading and understand why it is worth investing in this skill.
Emotional intelligence at work: what is it?
Emotional intelligence at work is a soft Skill (behavioral competence) that consists in knowing how to recognize, evaluate and influence your own feelings and those of others in professional relationships.
The concept became popular from the studies of psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who published the book Emotional Intelligence (Dude Publishing, 2004) in the 1990s. In the work, this is the definition for emotional intelligence:
"The ability to monitor your own feelings and emotions as well as those of others, to discriminate and use this information to guide others' thoughts and actions."
Therefore, within the organizational context, emotional intelligence is a valuable competence to conduct interpersonal relationships, have effective communication and manage conflicts.
It rests on four pillars:
Recognize emotions: identify feelings from speech, expressions, gestures and other forms of verbal and non-verbal language
Using emotions: using different emotions to communicate clearly and accurately
Understanding emotions: understanding emotional variations in their various nuances
Managing emotions: managing one’s own and others' emotions and feelings, keeping control of the situation and directing conversations towards your goals.
Importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace
Emotional intelligence at work is one of the most valued skills in today’s market. It appears among the most desired skills by companies in the Linkedin report (in English) Global Talent Report, alongside adaptability, collaboration, creativity, innovation and persuasion. In addition, it is already proven that emotional intelligence increases productivity and improves results in companies.
According to an English study conducted by Harvard, Boston, and Michigan Universities, published on Linkedin, employees with greater communication skills generate a 250% ROI (Return on Investment) on hires. In addition, intelligent leaders can emotionally increase their teams' performance by more than 30%.
Benefits of working with emotional intelligence
Applying emotional intelligence at work brings numerous benefits to teams and leaders within companies. Check out some advantages.
More effective communication
Emotional intelligence is the basis for clear and effective communication in the work environment. After all, employees need to be fully aware of their emotions and know how to deal with the feelings of others to convey messages correctly and avoid noise in their daily conversations.
In addition, this competence helps to develop empathy at work, which in turn leads to the practice of nonviolent communication.
Ease of teamwork
Teamwork is key to the success of any business, and emotional intelligence plays an important role in this dynamic. When employees communicate clearly and respect each other’s feelings, it becomes much easier to implement collaboration in companies and build more engaged teams.
Progress in conflict resolution
Conflicts and disagreements are inevitable in the workplace, but the proper domain of emotions makes all the difference in those hours.
Collaborators and leaders with developed emotional intelligence can mediate conflicts easily and manage emotions during difficult conversations, so that people reach an agreement as soon as possible.
Improved engagement
If engaging your team is your big challenge, emotional intelligence can help. If you understand the emotions of your employees, you’ll know which points to focus on to drive engagement across each profile. For example, there are people who get motivated with challenging tasks, while others need a compliment to move on and maintain their self-confidence.
It is part of emotional intelligence to understand these needs and to awaken the motivation in your team from them.
Stress and anxiety control
Another essential point of emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize your own feelings and control stress and anxiety in the work routine. When the professional does not understand its limits and does nothing about a possible overload, he may end up affected by Burnout syndrome. This physical and mental exhaustion hinders productivity, compromises team results and generates a serious problem of turnover (turnover) in companies. Therefore, it is important to develop awareness of one’s own emotions to establish boundaries and maintain mental health at work.
How to apply emotional intelligence at work
It’s not that complicated to apply emotional intelligence at work, as long as you’re committed to this mission. Check out some tips to start today.
1. Develop your self-awareness
Before recognizing and managing emotions in others, you need to exercise self-consciousness and understand your own feelings. At work, you can take short breaks during office hours to close your eyes, take a deep breath and understand what you’re feeling at that moment. It is important to learn to identify the emotions that come to light in different situations, such as during a meeting, before an important delivery, after a complicated feedback, among other occasions.
2. Work the negative emotions
When you begin to recognize your emotions, you will come across several negative feelings that appear in everyday work.
It is normal to feel frustration, fear, anxiety, indifference, anger, indignation, among other emotions that are aroused in corporate situations. But it is in these emotions that you should focus your efforts, understanding what are your main causes and thinking about how they can affect your relationships within the company.
3. Be pragmatic
Emotional self-control is necessary to adopt a more pragmatic and strategic stance in communicating with colleagues and managers.
You need to be able to define which emotions are most useful in the workplace (for example, calm, security, optimism or focus) and put them into practice in your daily relationships, avoiding as much as possible impulsive attitudes. Thus, you will be in charge of your feelings and know how to awaken them at the right times to achieve their goals.
4. Use positive psychology
Positive psychology is an important tool to boost your happiness and well-being at work. With it, you have more facility to cultivate positive emotions such as joy, satisfaction, gratitude and enthusiasm. So it’s worth applying your principles to become more engaged and prioritize the most productive emotions instead of those that disrupt your routine.
5. Exercise your empathy
To recognize the emotions in others in the same way you did with yourself, you will have to develop your empathy. Basically, this competence allows you to put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand their views. From the moment you can identify others' emotions, you will know how to act in each situation to have a more harmonious relationship with your colleagues, motivate subordinates and deal with your superiors. It is worth following the golden rule: treat everyone as you would like to be treated.
6. Be an excellent listener
Active listening is an indispensable tool for developing emotional intelligence at work. After all, you need to listen to people with mindfulness to fully understand their feelings - especially those that are not evident, but hidden in behavior.
If you are able to become a good listener, you will have much more facility to manage emotions in the company.
7. Develop your persuasion
Being emotionally intelligent requires an above-average persuasive ability. So you need to invest in developing that ability if you want to learn how to manage other people’s emotions. The more you master the feelings involved in a conversation, the more chances you have of leading it in a favorable direction and achieving your goals.
Remembering that persuading is different from manipulating. In persuasion, you will know what arguments to use to convince different profiles of people, taking into account their emotional needs and seeking an agreement favorable to both.
8. Improve your communication
Communication is the vehicle of emotional intelligence at work. Therefore, you should improve your techniques to communicate with different people using appropriate language, tone and expressions. An interesting strategy for this is rapport, which consists of mirroring the behavior of the other to create a genuine connection during a conversation
.
To create rapport in the dialogue, you need to identify points in common with the person and seek to reproduce some behaviors of it to generate synergy. Some examples are adjusting the tone of voice to be closer to that of the interlocutor, calling him by name and imitating some small gestures he makes while speaking - without exaggerating and seeming caricature, of course.
Source: https://www.poderdaescuta.com/inteligencia-emocional-no-trabalho/