Superyacht and fleet captain Jako Hall has developed significant leadership skills through the course of a career spanning decades, recognizing all too well the importance of emotional intelligence in effective people management. This article will take a closer look at emotional intelligence and how it enables employers to build stronger relationships, helping teams become more cohesive and improving business performance overall.
Also known as emotional quotient or ‘EQ’, emotional intelligence is a term that describes a person’s ability to understand, manage and utilize their emotions in positive ways. EQ helps people to communicate effectively, overcome challenges, relieve stress, defuse conflict and empathize with others. Emotional intelligence enables people to build stronger personal and professional relationships, boosting success and helping them to achieve their career and personal goals. By improving their ability to connect with their feelings, an individual is better equipped to turn ideas into action and make smarter choices about what matters to them most.
An emotionally intelligent person possesses four core capabilities:
- Self-awareness, recognizing their own emotions and how they affect their thought processes and behavior. They know their strengths and weaknesses and have self-confidence.
- Self-management, enabling the individual to control compulsive feelings and behaviors and manage their emotions in healthy ways, following through on commitments, taking the initiative and adapting to changing circumstances.
- Relationship management, allowing them to communicate clearly, develop and nurture good relationships, work well in a team, and inspire and influence others.
- Social awareness, instilling empathy to help the individual understand the emotions, concerns and needs of other people, better placing them to pick up on emotional cues and recognize the power dynamics in group situations.
Emotional intelligence not only affects the individual’s academic and career performance but also impacts both their mental and physical health. Left unchecked, stress and negative emotions can spiral into mental health problems such as anxiety or depression. Uncontrolled stress also affects the immune system, raising blood pressure, speeding up the aging process and contributing to medical conditions such as infertility, heart disease and strokes.
There has been a paradigm shift in leadership styles over the decades, with a huge emphasis placed on EQ today. Whereas leadership traditionally revolved around giving orders, effective business leadership has a different face in the modern world, with the onus placed on self-awareness and fostering relationships rather than merely issuing instructions. Today’s great leaders are attuned to their subordinates and peers having learned to understand emotions, helping them to foster trusting relationships by identifying and managing emotions in more positive ways.
An individual with a high level of EQ possesses a keen understanding of their own emotions, enabling them to regulate their responses and keep their cool even in high-stakes scenarios. This self-mastery translates into a magnetic ability to motivate and inspire teams. Beyond the confines of task-oriented leadership, emotionally intelligent leaders possess the empathy necessary to connect with team members, enabling them to instill a sense of belonging and purpose, encouraging commitment and loyalty in return. Not everyone is born with EQ, but fortunately this is a skill that can be learned and polished over time, improving the social skills of leaders and helping them to communicate, inspire and motivate by showing self-awareness and empathy.
Of course, IQ and technical expertise remain key aptitudes for effective business leadership. Leaders need to be able to fulfill a variety of different functions, and to excel they must be exemplary in what they do. Nevertheless, emotional intelligence gives professionals a considerable competitive edge, boosting their self-awareness and interpersonal skills, creating a firm foundation for effective leadership, and poising them and their business for long-term success.
