What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence or can commonly known as EQ (Emotional Quotient) is part of human intelligence where a person can understand and manage his/her own emotion and people around. Formally, it is

“The capability of individuals to recognise their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour, and adjust emotions to adapt to environments” (Colman 2008).

It can help to communicate effectively, empathise with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. Emotional intelligence is commonly defined by four attributes: Self-management, Self-awareness, Social-awareness, and Relationship management.

1. Self-management: It means an individual manages personal emotion in healthy ways by controlling behaviours and impulsive feelings. It also involves adaptation to dynamic and changing situations.

2. Self-awareness: Self-awareness means that recognising personal emotions and how they affect behaviours and thoughts. Having good self-awareness means that the individual has self-confidence and knows personal strengths and weaknesses.

3. Social-awareness: It means having empathy that is shown by the ability to understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of other people.

4. Relationship management: Relationship management means an individual understands how to develop and maintain excellent relationships, inspire and influence people, has clear communication and teamwork skills.

In the partnership context, human interactions are inevitable. The emotion plays important role in the human interactions that eventually affect the relationship between individuals and organisations. In order to maintain long-lasting relationships, the importance of emotional intelligence is needed, especially extreme awareness of the changes. This will help both individual and partners to adapt to any situation. The relationship that is formed by human interactions will never be static. Small shifts in the dynamics of relationship signal a need for action.

The 4 attributes that are mentioned above helps to build collaborative partnerships (for the organisation’s leader or individual partner):

• Self-management helps the partners to follow through on commitments.
• Self-awareness helps the partners to acknowledge things that can be done (strengths and weaknesses).
• Social-awareness helps recognise the power dynamics in a group/organisation.
• Relationship management helps in how to work well between partners and managing conflict when it occurs.

EQ in an Effective Team

Human relationships are complex and sometimes it can be stressful. EQ, in general, will help us to control the emotion between ourself and others. Understanding personal and others needs are necessary to perform effectively. It always starts with the individual itself.

Controlling nature (people and environment) is nearly impossible. By understanding, managing, and meets our own emotional needs, we can start to influence others and go beyond. The next step is to connect and accommodate with similar people who hold similar values as ourselves.

This connection is relatively easy because of the similar values are easily recognisable between individuals with strong emotional intelligence. These values that glue people together to form conformity and culture in that group. Team members that share similar values are proven to be effective (Luca, J. and Tarricone, P. 2001).

In reality, it a lot common to see a connection between an individual with people who might not share similar values, and conflicts may happen. When conflicts occur, individuals with high emotional intelligence will help to assess the situation.

An individual with above-average EQ will be calm in a crisis and can make decisions sensitively despite the situation is chaotic. Therefore, to form an effective team, it should consist of above-average EQ team members that are completed with a high EQ leader.

Oversimplified Example

Here is an example of how EQ plays a significant role in team effectiveness. One of your team member who is well-known to be the star of the team shows unusual behaviours. He arrives late at the office, little to no contribution to the meeting, and having lunch alone.

As a person with high EQ, you noticed that there is something wrong with him despite he does not look grumpy or sad in his face. A few minutes before the office closes, you approach him and ask for his well-being. You mentioned what you have observed so far and you invited him to have dinner together to have a private talk about things that are bothering him at the moment. Luckily, he accepts your offer and talks about his personal problems.

With your above average EQ, you are not judging his situation and instead, you actively listening on his situation and let him talk freely that night. On the next day, you notice that he is back to his old self again. He arrives on time, contributes actively to the meeting, and he is happy.

Remember, EQ is much more complex than this story. But, this story is good enough to get the basic meaning of emotional intelligence. I will discuss more about it in the future article 😊. Stay tuned!

References:

Luca, J. and Tarricone, P. “Does emotional intelligence affect successful teamwork.” (2001).