The secret of your success in business is not your intelligence, cleverness, or what you learned at school or from internet marketing gurus. Your business could live or die by something called EQ or emotional intelligence.
As far as I can remember, I first learned about emotional intelligence in Daniel Goleman's book of that name, when it was published in 1995. It created quite a buzz at the time. He described emotional intelligence as people's ability to read and control emotions in themselves and others. His belief is that emotional intelligence is just as important as intellectual intelligence (often called IQ) for success in every arena of life, whether that be professional, academic, or interpersonal. He even coined the term "Emotional Quotient" and shortened it to "EQ", to use as a counterpoint to the term "IQ".
We find the concept of emotional intelligence very useful in helping ourselves and the people we work with to understand and manage relationships with others -- team members, customers, suppliers, business partners, and family. We know from experience that developing your EQ can have a tremendous impact on the success of your business and your enjoyment of your work and home lives.
We recommend you read Goleman's book to get the full background, but for now, here is an example of how EQ can affect our daily lives, in the way we communicate.
Initiating communication
There are people who spend their lives continually shooting themselves in the foot. For instance, the person who gives no thought to what they say, who always blurts out whatever pops into their mind, however blunt it is, and excuses it by saying, "I'm only being honest."
Well, to be perfectly honest, this is no different than saying, "I'm only being obnoxious."
To avoid negative reactions and results, when you initiate communication it's important to take a moment to think about what you want to communicate, how you will communicate and what reaction you want to get. So, if you're thinking like a business owner, you will want to always be totally aware of the objective of each piece of communication -- and how best to achieve it.
Think about communicating with team members, for example. They want to be appreciated, recognized, and praised. But sometimes they may need to be corrected and coached. (No-one's perfect!) How you give that kind of feedback - specifically, whether you use EQ or not - will determine whether they take any notice and can also affect their own emotions.
Imagine a business owner who wants to tell a team member that the task they just performed was not done well. Here are two examples of what that owner might say:
Without EQ: "Look at what you did! That's terrible! You're just incompetent!"
With EQ: "That could have had a better result if it had been handled differently. Let's talk about some other ways you could do that task and we'll see which one you think would work best for you."
You can easily see the contrast between the two approaches -- and I'm sure you can imagine how different the reactions from the recipient would be!
Without using emotional intelligence, the business owner would probably generate anger, resentment, and possibly fear of getting a warning or even being terminated. But with emotional intelligence, the business owner is able to project their concern without laying blame and is clearly focused on working with the team member to find a better solution. This "high EQ" approach would be unlikely to generate a defensive reaction and the team member would be far more open to talking about other ideas that they could use next time to get a better outcome.
Pro Tip: This also goes with our leadership philosophy: everyone comes to work to do a good job, but they may not have the knowledge or skills yet. It's always the business owner's responsibility to make sure that each person in the team has the right skill level or gets the right training so they can give you the results you need.
Reaction to communication
The second part of communication to think about in terms of EQ is how an individual reacts to communication when they receive it. Complaints from customers, bad news from a supplier, critiques from external parties can crop up every day -- so it's important to manage your response to those.
If you always have a negative reaction, like resentment, annoyance, or a bad temper whenever you receive some negative communication, you will make the workday miserable for your team members. Having an unhappy workplace is the last thing you want for your business, because unhappy people don't do good work. And eventually your team members will look for jobs elsewhere, because no-one wants to spend a big chunk of each day in a toxic work environment!
So the way a person reacts and responds to communication from others is a major part of emotional intelligence. It's all about managing your emotions, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article.
A common mistake when receiving negative communication is to respond far too quickly, with a knee-jerk statement, instead of thinking about the real meaning of what was said or what the possibilities for a response could be. Pausing for a breath, thinking it over for a few minutes or even sleeping on it before responding can be extraordinarily beneficial. You can easily say "I'll get back to you later" or "I need some time to process this." Waiting before responding is a great tactic that can prevent saying or emailing something that would worsen the situation!
Pro Tip: Talking about emails, I have two tactics I use when I'm upset or annoyed about an email I received. The first method is that I leave the message alone and close my laptop, then go back to it a few hours later or the next day. By then I've had time to reflect and can respond in a more measured way. The other tactic I use is to create a completely new email, with no name in the To field (so it would go nowhere if I accidentally pressed Send!), and I write down what I feel to get it off my chest. Then I delete the draft message!
Hope you found this article useful! What examples of good or bad EQ have you seen recently?
If you'd like to read more on this topic, here are links to some of Goleman's books that we recommend. If you purchase from one of these links we will receive a small commission from Amazon - at no extra cost to you. This is one of the ways we fund our business so we can share our advice on this website.
This is the original Goleman book I read back in 1995, which was updated in 2005:
This next one is from 2005 and explains how emotional intelligence is the key to success in any field of endeavor, whether it's your job or your business:
And here's his latest, published in August 2019:
Happy reading!
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