Developing Collaboration Part 2: An introduction to emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is a term you may have come across, but not fully understood. It has many applications as it is about how well you can manage and regulate your emotions and responses. Emotional intelligence and teamwork are incredibly closely interlinked because the best teams that work together well are able to create a good interpersonal relationship within the team. Collaboration is a soft skill that relies heavily on your social skills and your ability to not only understand your own and other people’s emotions but adapt to them in a way that will result in a positive relationship.
First, however, we need to understand what is meant by emotional intelligence in this context. The term ‘emotional intelligence’ was coined by two scientists Salovey and Mayer in 1990, based on a theory proposed by Howard Gardner about multiple intelligences (essentially, differentiating between IQ, emotional intelligence and others). They defined it as ‘[the] ability to monitor and regulate one’s own and other’s feelings, and to use feelings to guide one’s thinking and action’. From this definition, a man named Daniel Goleman deduced the 5 key aspects of emotional intelligence:
• Self-awareness - the ability to understand and evaluate your own emotions. Emotional intelligence is not about suppressing negative emotions, but instead recognising them and what they are telling you e.g. fear, although a negative emotion, warns us of danger and stops us taking unnecessary risks.
• Self-regulation - the ability to effectively manage the negative emotions to work through stress and conflict. It is also the ability to control your reaction to emotions e.g. anger is a useful emotion for motivation, but you must also have the self-regulation to not have angry outbursts and instead manage your emotions.
• Motivation - Being motivated is having an intrinsic, internal drive to complete your goals. It is an important part of being emotionally intelligent as it allows you to push forward and focus all your efforts towards a target, and especially important when working with other people as the ability to motivate not only yourself but others will make you invaluable in a team.
• Empathy - This is the ability to understand what other people are feeling and ‘put yourself in their shoes’. Everyone will experience things differently, but even a good general sense of how someone is feeling allows you to connect with people emotionally, which is important for social interactions, especially teamwork where you are working closely with someone and dependent on them.
• Social skills - This is the ability to pick up on social cues, make conversation and generally understand how social interactions work. People with good social skills are able to build connections with people quickly, but also understand body language, power structures and much more that helps them integrate easily into a team.
Being able to recognise and manage your emotions simply on a personal scale is a difficult skill to learn, but an invaluable one. Negative emotions cannot and should not be suppressed, but instead learning how to deal with them and manage your behaviour is incredibly beneficial in being able to process these emotions. The sooner and more effectively you can process negative emotions, the quicker you will get over them. High emotional intelligence also helps you with decision making, conflict resolution, stress management and general emotional wellbeing.m
Beyond your personal life, emotional intelligence is very important in your school and career life. EI, unlike IQ, is not something that is fixed, which means it can constantly be improved on. The skills that you develop through EI such as motivation will enable you to be a better learner in the classroom, but also a more valuable employee in the future.
Having a good baseline understanding of emotional intelligence is important in general as it underpins the way you manage emotions. Next week, we will look at these 5 attributes of emotional intelligence in more detail and how it links to teamwork, as I’m sure you can already begin to make some links in your head.