Emotional intelligence involves knowledge and skills around understanding and managing the motivations and emotional responses of other people. While it isn’t always necessary to have emotional intelligence to succeed (particularly as a leader), in the absence of these skills, you tend to make your job harder.
When you lack emotional intelligence, other people often do not want to work with you, to engage with your projects, or to go the extra mile to help you succeed. People may go along with you reluctantly because of the authority of your position, but that does not mean that those people can be counted on.
You can improve your emotional intelligence skills. Indeed, programs like Human Dimensions of Organizations are designed to support this learning. Your first step, though, is to recognize that you need some additional training. Here are three warning signs that your emotional intelligence needs work:
Unexpected reactions
A key element of emotional intelligence is the ability to read how people are feeling about a situation and to use that to make educated guesses about their goals and motivations. When you lack this sensitivity, you often do and say things that create negative reactions in others including frustration, anger, and annoyance.
You can’t please everybody all the time, and trying to do so will likely make your work life harder. But, you should strive to be aware of who is likely to be upset about actions you have taken so that you can prepare them for outcomes they won’t like—or at least be ready for their complaints.
When you find consistently that you get negative reactions from people around you that you did not anticipate, that is a good sign that you are not being sensitive to their desires and needs. Even if you just come to expect negative reactions from other people without knowing why they occur, that suggests that you would benefit from emotional intelligence training.
Being passed over
If you have ambitions to move into a leadership role at work, then you aim to put yourself in line for promotions. Of course, you’re not the only one looking for these roles. Many of your colleagues are probably also interested in moving into leadership positions. In addition, there are often people from outside your organization who may also want that responsibility. That means there are many more people interested in leadership roles than there are roles to be filled.
To ascend into a leadership role, you have to be prepared for some disappointment. There will be times when you desperately want a particular position and it goes to someone else. Talk to any leader, and you are likely to find that they can tell you about several roles they were interested in that they did not get.
That said, if you are consistently passed over for promotions, there are likely to be some skills that the people filling those positions believe you lack. It can be valuable to get some mentoring from someone you trust to talk frankly about the gaps in your knowledge and skills. You may not always be told directly that your gap is in emotional intelligence. Instead, you may get feedback that people are hesitant to work with you, that they have concerns about how well you get along with others, or that they wonder how you will motivate your team. Those are all limitations that training in emotional intelligence can help to fix.
Denial of requests
To get things done in any organization, you need resources to make that happen. You might require help from other people, money, or time. Unless you’re at the top of the food chain, you will need agreement from other people to provide those resources so that you can carry out a project.
A good project proposal requires a lot of emotional intelligence skills. You have to understand the goals of other people in the organization and demonstrate how your project will help them to achieve those goals. You must cultivate support for projects among key stakeholders. You have to engage with other people who will have to help on the project to find things they care about that would lead them to want to be involved. You need to understand when other people find a project risky and respond to their concerns.
Falling short in any of these areas is likely to lead people to deny your requests to support a particular project. In the absence of emotional intelligence, you will often double-down on your project by repeating how important it is and why it is critical to move forward with it. But, the merits of a particular project are always subject to interpretation, and so if you don’t have motivated supporters for a project, they can often find reasons why they should not allow it to move forward.
As with getting a promotion, you can’t expect every project you propose to get a green light. But, when you find that you are consistently rebuffed in your efforts to try something new, that’s a good sign that you have not created allies. Building better emotional intelligence skills is likely to make you more likely to craft and socialize proposals that will engage people in a position to move it forward.
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