How to Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence
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Mindful leaders know that serving others is the key to more innovation and creativity, greater team involvement, happier followers, creating a high involvement culture and better business results.

Are you a leader who would like to improve your emotional intelligence and have a more fulfilling life and career? For over thirty years, I have been working with enlightened leaders to improve their emotional intelligence and thrive at work.

It takes self-awareness and empathy to grow and become a better leader. I have coached hundreds of people to improve their EI effectiveness. You can choose to work with an executive coach to help facilitate your emotional intelligence leadership development.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." —Victor Frankel

Emotional Intelligence

Unlike IQ, which is unchanging from childhood on, emotional intelligence can be developed. In fact, it usually does become greater with age and maturity. The importance of developing one’s emotional intelligence is essential to success in the workplace. Utilizing the power and energy of one’s emotions leads to high motivation, and improves problem-solving and decision-making.

People work better when they good, and feeling good about oneself and others requires good management of emotions. Some people are better at this than others, but everyone can learn the skills.

Understanding emotions contributes toward building an emotionally intelligent organization. An emotionally intelligent organization can be imagined where:
  • Everyone communicates with understanding and respect
  • People set group goals and help others work toward them
  • Enthusiasm and confidence in the organization are widespread
EQ-I 2.0 Assessment Tool

A new and effective tool to aid in the improvement of emotional and social intelligence is the recently revised Emotional Quotient Inventory 2.0 or EQ-I 2.0. The creator of the original EQI, Dr. Reuven Bar-On created the term "emotional quotient" or "EQ" referring to a numerical score similar to what one would receive on an IQ test. John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire and Peter Salovey (now the President of Yale) popularized the term "emotional intelligence" (EI).

In his insightful book, The EQ Edge, Dr. Steven Stein explains a basic method of helping a leader increase their emotional intelligence. The following example explains the process.

The EQ Enhancement Process

George Cook, an executive vice president of sales and marketing wants to be more successful or more efficient in his duties. Or, perhaps, his superiors feel he could be, and have urged him to upgrade his skills. First, we look at his job description. What does he do, what roles does he perform? The answers to these questions allow us to figure out which of the 16 competency scales are essential to his position.

But chances are that his position is not unique – so his executive coach constructs an EQ profile of his most successful peers within that firm, and in other comparable firms. Next, George takes the EQ-I 2.0, and his results are scored and interpreted. The executive coach then generates a comprehensive report outlining his relative strengths and weaknesses.

George’s strengths and weaknesses are then compared to his successful and in some cases, less successful peers. Executive coaching then focuses on those attributes most crucial to his job, and on which he needs the most help. Eventually, his low or mediocre scores will improve, and his profile will begin to more accurately mirror that of high performers. George will have developed new abilities or been able to bolster latent ones, so that he functions more like the successful senior executive he wished to be.

The use of 360-degree surveys are also a revealing way to measure and develop emotional intelligence, because such surveys ask colleagues, boss, direct reports and even family members to rate the person on emotional competencies. The EQI 360 feedback assessment method offers a fuller picture for anyone wanting to develop a plan for improvement. Executives who work intensely with an executive coach trained in the emotional competencies for successful leadership get better with the support of the system or organization.