Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is one of the most critical indicators of success in life. Many experts believe that EQ is even more important than IQ, with emotional intelligence seen as a top quality in leadership. But what is emotional intelligence exactly, what processes does it involve, and how can you apply it in your own life? Keep reading to answer these questions and more to improve your business operations and personal life.
Growing Through Emotional Intelligence
Too often, we see organizations stagnate because of an unwillingness to adopt new ideas that help overcome the challenges of the past couple of years. But -- let’s face it -- new business processes and change in general are here to stay, and adaptation is vital. This is a mindset Couranto has fully embraced; our platform enables users to implement new and improved ways of communicating and collaborating on solutions, utilizing emotional intelligence to create a transformative effect for operations.
Emotional intelligence is largely the ability to be aware of and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. For these reasons, 37% of surveyed institutions use EQ to inform their leadership development programs. It's about being able to understand your feelings and the feelings of others to respond effectively. By managing your emotions with EQ, you provide yourself with positive ways to manage stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict within your organization and personal life.
Emotional intelligence benefits by helping people be aware of feelings that need to be addressed or expressed. In turn, this can then help you manage more productively. Additional benefits of emotional intelligence include:
Better team dynamics
Stronger relationships
Enhanced leadership skills
Improved communication skills
Greater stress management abilities
EQ can help provide a structure for developing and maintaining relationships in your work and personal life through:
Improved communication - Emotionally intelligent people are better able to get their message across, which helps them to interact more effectively with others.
More successful relationships - By recognizing and responding to the emotions of those around them, individuals can adapt their communication style to ensure that they understand others' points of view.
Enhanced self-awareness - People who practice EQ tend to be more aware of their emotions and those of others. They're not afraid to ask questions if something doesn't make sense.
Positive mindset - Emotionally intelligent people tend to have a more positive outlook, which helps them be more resilient and better able to deal with challenges as they arise.
Once these relationships have improved, teams need a tool to improve how they seamlessly communicate. Couranto helps inspire information-based communities through their platform, which empowers teams, frees up administrators, and adds value for your users.
The Process of EQ
At Couranto, we’ve seen a significant shift in the business world throughout the pandemic. To survive, even as our world turned virtual business relationships were in some ways actually humanized more than ever before as kindness and empathy shined through. While the pandemic took so much away, it gave us a certain power to connect deeply with ourselves, our companions, and our colleagues in a new and humanistic way, highlighting the importance of emotional intelligence; be it the industry banking, accounting, administrators, or more, we all must serve our audience by better understanding the behaviors of others.
Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of and manage your own emotions and the feelings of others to respond effectively. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as:
Inferring how another person is feeling and what they might be thinking.
Understanding the messages you give out to other people through your behavior or speech.
Teaching you about your triggers for certain feelings and how those emotions make you feel.
If you want to increase your EQ levels, try to learn more about how you work and why you do the things that you do. Understanding your emotions and motivations makes it easier to control them instead of letting them control you. Once you have mastered some of these skills, you can become more emotionally balanced by becoming aware of feelings that need to be addressed or expressed, providing a structure for developing and maintaining relationships in your work and personal life.
Application of Emotional Intelligence within Business
There are many ways that emotional intelligence can be communicated, and humans share our feelings through what we say and how we say it. Emotional intelligence is often conveyed by body language and gestures, but whether positive or negative, emotions are most often expressed through facial expressions. Tone and inflection play a role and can also help convey how someone feels about an event or another person.
Emotional intelligence can be applied to the workforce to create a positive work environment. By ensuring that employees feel comfortable sharing their emotions and doing their jobs effectively, companies help employees manage their stress and respond effectively to challenging situations. Employers can use emotional intelligence to motivate employees and connect with them on a deeper level, increasing the effectiveness of the company. When used with tools like information management, you gain better control of operations and a more motivated team.
How can we improve EQ by improving access to information?
Emotional Intelligence within the work environment has never been more important due to how we have worked during the past two years. Our jobs are already stressful enough, but without access to critical content and dealing with multiple digital assets, it can drain individuals and make them less productive. We have found that companies need streamlined cloud-based applications to meet these needs, such as Coranto's Clarity or Discovery hub.
We all know that people are the most critical asset of any company. But, it can be challenging to manage them and get them to change their behavior if they don't want to. The problem is that many companies try to force changes on employees without giving them the tools or resources needed for success. Couranto can help by supplying your team with customizable data tools to help your organization perform at its best and consulting services to ensure that organizations work more efficiently and improve productivity.
In general, people become more confident and communicative, and more productive, when they have ready access to information. On the flip side, they become less confident and more isolated when their access to information is constrained. That’s why a solution like Couranto’s Discovery Hub is so useful, to provide teams with ready access to third-party content which in many cases, they didn’t even realize was available.
The End Goal of EQ
There are many situations where it is necessary to draw upon emotional intelligence, like an important business meeting or presentation. These situations require the right tools to do your job efficiently and effectively. If one loses their composure during such an occasion, they risk losing the trust and respect of others in the room. This stress can be alleviated with the ease of access to information and the convenience that cloud-based platforms provide.
There are a few ways to know that you have reached some measures of success of emotional intelligence. One way is by understanding and using emotions to benefit yourself and others. Another way is by regulating your feelings, including managing stress and responding effectively to challenging situations. Finally, it is creating a positive work environment.
However, improving emotional intelligence cannot be the only business change to drive success. In Dale Carnegie’s Transformation Formula, Emotional Change (EC) + Behavior Change (BC) = Performance Change (PC). Even if emotional changes are made, behaviors must also adapt to drive changes in someone's personal or professional life. The same goes for organizations providing emotional and behavioral changes with informational tools that help companies thrive.
