Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace Training

Most people call emotional intelligence “people skills” but it’s more than just how you interact with people. It involves knowing, and understanding the perspectives of others and also understanding your own emotions to get a clear picture of your being.

As business leaders, you are responsible for the well-being of your employees. However, many employers fail to address the need for empathy and compassion in the workplace. This leads to high turnover rates, low efficiency, and even employee burnout. This quick exercise should help you to become more empathic and improve your Emotional intelligence at work.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What are the five components of emotional intelligence?
  • A common misconception about emotional intelligence is that it’s dependent on how you interact with other people. Most of the components of emotional intelligence involve introspection. Here are the components of emotional intelligence According to Daniel Goleman:
    • Self-awareness – The ability to consciously understand your state of being.
    • Self-regulation – The ability to control your emotions and discern the right thing to say at the right time
    • Motivation – The ability to be stimulated by your personal goals 
    • Empathy – The ability to understand the feelings of others as well as your own.
    • Social Skills – The ability to appropriately interact with others.
• What makes someone emotionally intelligent?
  • Emotionally intelligent individuals have ease in expressing the components of EI. However, what shines most is their self-regulation and social skills. There are some slip ups from time to time but rather than that, they are consistent.
• How do Leaders use emotional intelligence?
  • Business leaders use emotional intelligence through compassionate leadership and empathy. They use this to redesign the workplace into a less hostile environment.

They know and understand their team’s emotions and habits which is why they are easily alerted with any changes. This provides them an opening to communicate with the member in a deeper degree. This eases the workplace environment for the affected member.

Emotional Intelligence Training

• Set a Goal – This goal must be realistic, achievable, and distinguishable to your current status. Ask yourself what you want to achieve in terms of emotional intelligence. This will serve as your direction on how to improve yourself in the workplace.

• Introspect – Start within. Asses yourself through the components of emotional intelligence. Observe your actions, your judgements, and how you interact with others. Grab a pen and paper, write down your honest opinion about yourself. How you see yourself, and how you think others see you. This paints an image of your current being.

This shows you everything you need to improve within yourself as a leader in the workplace

• Evaluate Your Environment – See how your presence affect others. How did your actions affect others? Were there any long term effects? This is an exercise on self-awareness. 

Knowing what you don’t know about yourself is a step towards emotional intelligence. Once you know how you affect others, what steps are you going to take to improve yourself in this aspect?

• Analyze Your Reaction – How does external stimulus affect you? What actions or judgements did you make during the heat of the moment? Was your reaction appropriate for the specific scenario? What do you do during an influx of intense emotion? 

These questions show you your level of self-regulation. Emotionally intelligent people tend to keep a cool mind or give appropriate reaction to given situations.

• Identify Your Motivation – Start by asking your-self simple yes or no questions. Do you like what you’re doing? Does it give you satisfaction? Is there a sense of fulfilment with what you’re currently doing?

You can then move to more specific questions such as What would make your day-to-day more exciting? What would make you feel better as a leader? This exercise would identify your motivational pain points and the small but significant factors that could help improve your self-motivation.

• Open Yourself for Feedback – This exercise step requires only one question. Try talking to your members or peers about things outside work. You can talk about any topic you wish. After the conversation, ask yourself what the other person felt talking to you. Then ask for their honest feedback. This measures how empathic and how open you are in accepting the views of others. 

In this step, there will be a lot of hits and misses, and that’s normal.

• Test out your social skills – Socialize with people of different levels within your workplace. How long could you keep a conversation? Did you pay attention to what the other person tried to put across? How engaging were you during conversations? Were you able to show your authentic self? 

These final questions determine your social skills towards real people. It says a lot about how you interact with the workplace as the real you.

Final thoughts

Keep in mind that this is training, not an exam. Although there are a lot of questions, there are no right or wrong answers. What’s important is that you remain true to yourself when answering these questions. Having the answers to these questions is not enough, you must act upon these answers to develop your emotional intelligence in the workplace.