How To Improve Your Emotional Intelligence To Become A Better Leader
3 Ways to Develop More Emotional Intelligence as a Leader
There's a lot you can do to develop more emotional intelligence.
However, there are a few things that are most effective. These approaches allow you to develop all, or several, emotional intelligence qualities at once.
Here are 3 practical ways to develop your emotional intelligence:
1. Practice mindfulness to develop self-awareness
The ability to manage yourself, through self-awareness and self-regulation, is essential to leading others; the example you set influences everyone around you.
"Star leaders are stars at leading themselves, first,” says Emotional Intelligence author and psychologist Daniel Goleman. "If you can't fine-tune your own actions – keeping yourself from blowing up or falling to pieces – you'll be poor at handling the people you deal with.”
Mindfulness is one of the most effective ways to develop both your self-awareness and self-regulation (the ability to manage and respond to our own emotions).
2. Learn to accept feedback without becoming defensive
According to Rachel Green, Director at The Emotional Intelligence Institute in Western Australia, "Being able to hear feedback without becoming defensive is an essential skill for a leader, and one that reflects an emotionally intelligent leader.”
The problem, she says, is that many leaders are too defensive to admit they need to make improvements.
3. Use 1-on-1s and downtime to develop empathy and mentor employees
Researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues at the University of Parma, Italy have discovered that our mind is equipped with a "mirror neuron system.”
The system fires neurons that replicate or "mirror” the behavior of another person as though you were the one acting in that way.
As a leader, your employees look to you to establish important parts of your team's culture: from communication habits to the willingness to taking ownership for your mistakes. Almost all of these are tied to your emotional intelligence.
No matter what you do to develop your emotional intelligence, work to identify your weaknesses. Be conscious about how you're developing those areas moving forward so you can give the best of yourself to your team.
References:
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/how-to-improve-emotional-intelligence/