How to Leverage Emotional Intelligence so Your Managers Become More Effective

What do you do if your team is about to have a blowup? And more specifically, let's say it's one of your managers and your top performer within that division and things are about to get heated? This is one of those situations that many managers and leaders within organizations aren't really well equipped for because there's no training on that. And one of the gaps that exists when it comes to making managers effective in small, the mid sized organizations is giving them the tools necessary and the training necessary for them to build their skills. When it comes to emotional intelligence, how you handle a heated situation between you and the team is a critical skill that needs to be built and practiced so that you have a highly effective organization and team. This is one of the key ways that you can keep everybody focused on the goal versus on whatever slights might be happening that's creating friction within the team. So what are the pillars that managers need to be aware of and practice so that you can be more effective from an emotional intelligence perspective? First, there's self awareness and there's any number of ways that you can develop it. 360 assessments and surveys and personality assessments are all different ways to get an idea of where you stand as an individual, what your blind spots and gaps are, and what your strengths are. That's a critical component of being an effective leader, is being able to reflect and acknowledge the role you play, the gaps you have, and how you can bring other people to shore up those gaps and leverage everybody's strengths to move forward through difficult situations. A second skill that needs to be practiced, especially if you want to be an effective leader, is to be really skilled when it comes to self regulation. You need to be able to keep your cool during high stress situations because you're actually modeling what good looks like. That allows you to demonstrate to your team what the expected behavior is in a difficult situation that builds trust and stability with the team. This is one of those capabilities that allows you to maintain your composure and instead of escalating a situation, taking the necessary steps to deescalate and figure out what the proper path forward is going to be. A third skill that managers need to be practicing on a regular basis is really their empathy. One of the big gaps that exists within first time managers and many leaders actually is the tendency when they're confronted with a situation, to immediately move into action. And that actually puts you in reactive versus proactive mode. And how does empathy tie into this? Whenever you're dealing with a stressful situation, you need to deescalate and be able to find common ground. And that requires you to tap into your empathy and try to find a way to relate and open up those communication lines and listen to understand why that situation happened in the first place. That's going to be one of the key things that you're going to need to do if you're expecting or at least if you're hoping to build an environment that is one that is rooted in mutual respect and collaboration. Ultimately, when you look at all of these things, it's all nested under the responsibility of leaders to build personalized and individual connections with everybody on the team. And that requires you to be proactive in engaging everyone on the team in formal and informal engagements, so that everybody is honing their skills, everybody's building relationships with each other, and you. And that's going to go a long way in building team cohesion and mitigating the chances of these blow ups happening. One of the things that needs to be considered when you're factoring in how do you tap into your emotional intelligence, how do you build the capability across your team to tap into their emotional intelligence? This rolls back to one of the themes that we've talked to talked about in several occasions and that's communication leaders and managers have to be consistently and constantly talking about how the mission, vision, values of the organization ties into the work and also how the Mission Vision values support each individual on the team on what they want to accomplish and achieve in their career. And that is the basis of inspiration and motivation. If your team is inspired and motivated and has a deep connection with each other and with the mission of the organization and the work, they're going to look at the situations that come up in more collaborative light versus creating divisions amongst themselves. This is one of the things that's really challenging is that when you're focusing in on connecting the dots and this is a big gap that happens in small to mid sized organizations is that the connectivity between the executive leadership, mission vision values and the work is often missed. This is one of those game changing elements that managers can really impact to help the team better achieve their goals and objectives. So when you're looking at honing your skills from an emotional intelligence perspective, the key is for you to model what good looks like. These are things that you need to practice.

You should be actively tapping resources and tools that are available to you so that you can practice these skills and pass that on to your team. The more emotionally intelligent you are as a manager, the better communication you have and the more effective your team will be. When you're looking at building a high performance team.