While employers often prioritise hard skills when selecting talent, emotional intelligence, or ‘EQ’, is much harder to evidence on a CV. Yet it is often central to effective leadership.
Women often score higher for EQ than men, but it’s important not to confuse EQ with being emotional; to leverage EQ for organisational success, leaders must combine self-awareness, humility and empathy in order to give their decision making resilience and commerciality.
Use EQ to adjust your leadership behaviours
Leadership is not a one-size-fits all skill, which means that approaches to managing, coaching and mentoring one individual may not be effective with another. Using EQ to understand others’ responses to your management and mentoring behaviours will help you to adjust those behaviours to fit the individual. In simple terms, for example, some people may work better with very structured tasks and specific deadlines, while others may see this as micro-management. Asking for feedback and acting on that feedback is a practical way to ensure you’re tailoring your management approach to align with what works best for each individual. This can be done through regular check-ins with team members, as well as at 360 reviews. It’s important to create an environment where individuals see you acting on feedback so that they feel they are being heard.
Use EQ to build effective teams
In the same way that a leader’s style has the potential to empower or demotivate a team member, team dynamics can also be a springboard to enhanced productivity or a reason why talented individuals underperform. By tapping into EQ when developing teams – whether during the recruitment process or when assigning projects – leaders can ensure that the team is made up of complementary personalities and motivations. The word complementary is important here, because it’s not about putting people who are alike together; it’s about having the EQ to understand how individuals will balance as a team, so that they’re working together towards organisational goals.
Use EQ to reflect and learn
No matter where you are in an organisation, you are always learning. Using emotional intelligence to reflect on your own performance and that of your team will help you identify and implement learning points. An emotional response is unhelpful when things go wrong, but emotional intelligence is all about having your emotions under control and being able to understand the behaviours and responses affecting outcomes. Keeping a work journal is a very useful, practical way to implement this self-reflection because it enables you to look back, see patterns and effectively become your own mentor. This is also a helpful way to ensure that enhancing your EQ skills is built into your own personal development.
Use EQ to develop inclusive policies
The performance of your team at work is not just affected by what happens in the workplace, but by what’s happening in their lives too. As a leader, it’s not your place to pry into your team’s personal lives, but it is part of your remit to create an environment where they feel confident and comfortable to come to you with any challenges they may be facing at work or at home, and to respond to those issues where possible. This is where your company policies have a really key part to play. Using EQ will help you to understand what’s important to team members and develop inclusive policies that will support and motivate employees. For example, if the majority of your team have children or elderly parents to care for – or both! – how can your flexible working policy enable them to work around their home responsibilities in a way that is productive and practical for your organisation? Talking to the team and using their feedback to further develop inclusive policies will motivate people and improve employee retention.
Use EQ to drive a successful EVP
Attracting and retaining talent is integral to the success of any organisation and your employee value proposition (EVP) is the bedrock of that objective. Using EQ to understand what’s important to your team and find ways of building that into the culture or your organisation will help you attract and retain talent. All of the points above feed into this process but it is an ongoing task, that requires EQ to remain front and centre of observing, understanding and responding to what’s happening at every level of the business.
