Emotional Intelligence In Corporate World

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion - Dale Carnegie.

I heard people saying that I have no Emotional Quotient. According to them they have a good emotional intelligence as they are not emotionally connected to anyone. But is emotional intelligence only mean no emotional connection and controlling anger or is it more than that?

Let’s try to understand what emotional intelligence is and why it is important in personal and professional world?

Emotional intelligence is not a new word. Everyone has heard of it. In general terms it is the sum of all the capabilities which a person posses to control his/her own outlook and emotions. And through this he made perception of the people around and react accordingly.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman gave its five fundamental mechanisms -

Conscious Knowledge

It is the ability of a person to recognise his own emotions and the way they will affect others.

Self-Reliance

The aptitude to control moods, and to think before acting

Internal Motivation

When an individual driven to do work or follow goals for his personal reasons and satisfaction. And not in the greed of rewards.

Understanding

Good leader and team working involves understanding other's feeling, motivation.

Social Skills

The aptitude to manage relationships and form networks.

There is no doubt in this that emotional intelligence is the valuable asset of a workplace. In workplace there is always need of a motivated employee, an employee who possess good leadership qualities and also know very well how to work in a team and how to build a good team and team spirit among the members.

The other main responsibilities of an employee in an organization are to collaborate with others, manage work-related stress, resolve conflicts within workplace relationships, and learn from previous interpersonal mistakes.

A business will never run smoothly if its employees don’t possess these qualities. It doesn’t matter how much intelligent they are, how much IQ they have, unless and until they have good EQ.

Now companies have started hiring people based on their EQ. There are various psychological tests which companies take while hiring process to check the level of emotional intelligence. They also add lie – detector techniques to make sure that no one is lying and giving only honest answers.

According to Hindustan Times Report, “This year at World Economic Forum, emotional intelligence (also known as ‘emotional quotient’ or EQ) was ranked sixth in the world on the list of top 10 skill that employees will need to process to thrive in the workplace of the future”.

This statement is enough to describe the growing importance of IQ in corporate sector of not only India, but of the whole world.

This doesn't mean high emotional intelligence is must for all jobs. Various studies have proved that for some jobs which require dealing with lots of people for example sales and marketing needs a person with high emotional intelligence for sure. But for jobs which are more individualistic such as accountant and research scientist high EQ is not that important.

On the other hand, it has also been found that people who work alone but possess high EQ work may perform at lower level with those who have average EQ. The reason behind this is they are more concerned about other's emotions and feeling.

Managing EQ Is a psychological process - It's just the communication between rational and emotional brain. The information first reaches to emotional brain and in 1/30 th part of a second it reaches to rational mind. It's all about how well we manage this mind and how we react to the emotional brain.

There are also plenty of trainings available nowadays to improve the emotional quotient. One just needs to identify where he is lacking and what actually he needs.

All the best!