What is Emotional Intelligence? Having watched the Daniel Goleman interview, Social Intelligence and Leadership, I believe Emotional Intelligence is having an understanding of your emotions and how they affect you, and managing those emotions so they are an asset not a liability. Social Intelligence is translating those same skills into your interactions with others, most notably by listening and communicating effectively.
In the Emotional Intelligence test posted be McGraw-Hill the key traits they list are Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Self-Motivation, Empathy, and Social Skills. I believe these traits are important, but can be expanded upon. For one to practice leadership, Self-Awareness must become Social Awareness. Self-Management develops into managing and developing others. Self-Motivation becomes the ability to inspire motivation.
With the insight of Emotional Intelligence if I were to define the traits necessary for managers and leaders they would be; confidence in yourself and the potential of others, high levels of motivation and the ability to motivate, effective goal setting for yourself and your employees, ability to monitor your emotions and recognize the emotions of others, listen and communicate effectively, and be capable of managing internal and external conflict.
The entire scope of Emotional intelligence is necessary from lower to mid to upper-level management. The degrees to which specific skills are required would depend on what a manager spends most of their time doing. A lower level front-line manager spends a lot of time with employees and should be able to motivate and negotiate conflict. Middle level management should be capable of effectively communicating the company directives to lower management, and receive feedback in regards to progress and obstacles. Upper management should employ goal setting for where the company should be in both short and long-term. They might take into account the emotional climate of the company when planning the best direction to move the company to maximize their human resources.
As Daniel Goleman says, we can learn Emotional Intelligence. This is reassuring for me. I recently failed a “Personality Characteristics Test” which would have allowed me to progress to a new employment opportunity. Now that I know it was in fact an evaluation of my Emotional Intelligence Quotient, I am better able to prepare myself for a rewrite. I am still not sure how I am going to prepare myself to embrace conflictive situations and possess the overt outgoing attitude I seem to lack. Not to mention learning to embrace my fuzzy feelings and using them to aid in decision making. I thought managers didn’t have feelings…
References
Jones, G.R., George, J. M., Rock, M., Haddad, J.W., (2010) Essentials of Contemporary Management (3rd Canadian Ed.) McGraw-Hill Ryerson
Social Intelligence and Leadership [Video file], Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qv0o1oh9f4
I like you insight on to how the differnt levels of management should be able to work. I find often the problem is these managers only know how to communicate in certain ways and when they are taken out of there comfort zone it is tough for them to communicate on the differnt levels. I think it is essential for all managers to know how to communicate on all differnt levels
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