So this week’s video is all about looking at emotional intelligence and how you can use emotional intelligence within business to huge advantage.
Now, emotional intelligence or EQ sometimes as it’s referred to, is something that I’ve personally worked on in a lot of detail over the last 10 years of my career.
And, I feel that as a leader, I was a strong leader before, but I’ve gone from being strong to really excelling in a leadership function because of my deeper understanding of emotional intelligence.
So, if this is your first experience of exploring it and looking at it, I hope this is the first of many and this maybe triggers you to go on and look at it in a little bit more detail.
First of all, I want to talk about what emotional intelligence is. It’s the ability of individuals, especially leaders, to recognise, to understand, to manage, and also to influence emotions both in themselves and also in their team with the purpose of trying to achieve an overall better work environment and working conditions.
It’s about being really self aware, being able to self regulate, being able to motivate both yourself and others and having huge empathy.
Empathy to me is the biggest driver of emotional intelligence and also those really soft kind of social skills that go with it.
So, that’s kind of the introduction to emotional intelligence.
In a nutshell, if you just take one thing away from this, I want it to be that I always feel like if I do the right thing, the right thing by my customers, the right thing by my staff, that will lead to a positive outcome in business. That’s because I’m really confident that my business ethos, my behaviours, both of myself and also of my staff are underpinned by a really core set of values within the business.
Now, whether you’ve done an official process of identifying values in your business or of documenting values in your business, and even if you haven’t, chances are there will be a really strong set of values underpinning your business.
I can actually remember when I first did a piece of work with my leadership coach, Kirsty, on my own personal values and then we identified what the business values were and surprise surprise the two kind of went hand in hand and then when I looked back and I kind of reflected across the business I can see how, even though we’ve never written down on a piece of paper or stuck them up on the wall, these are our business values.
I could see the inherent set of values that the business was being run by. Now, what I will say is consistency. I’ve done another video in the past about consistency in business and how consistency can enable your staff to predict your behaviours. If they are able to predict your behaviours, they’re able to more or less act in the way that you want them to without you having to be involved in everything and it’s a real key skill of delegation.
Now that goes hand in hand with emotional intelligence. I think if you are consistent in what you do, you are always intending to do the right thing by your staff and your customers and you have positive intent with everything that you do. Those are the underlying influences and factors which can lead to really strong behaviour.
So I want you to do, if you haven’t already, I want you to do a little piece of work and try to write down what you feel are your own personal values and what you feel like are the values of the business and how you live, sleep and breathe that. This will be the start of your emotional intelligence journey.
Now, if there is one thing that gets in the way of emotional intelligence, I can tell you now, it’s ego.
I’m not going to sit here and say I don’t have an ego because that wouldn’t be true. Every one of us has an ego. For me, the key skill within Emotional Intelligence is learning how to manage that ego and keep that ego in check.
I can tell you now, when I first started in the business, I had huge aspirations for the business. I still do today, I have huge aspirations for my business. It’s a big part of who I am, and the values with which the business is run. But, the problem is you’ve got to make sure those aspirations are in line with your core values because what I did in the early years is I chased growth at all costs because I measured success based on growth.
This was growth in our top line, growth in our staff numbers, sometimes growth in the bottom line, however that was less important to me than growth in the top line because that was the one that fed the ego a little bit more. When I look back and I reflect on those behaviours, quite often I would let my ego get in the way of what I was doing.
Worse still, I can tell you now a few years ago, we had a really ambitious growth period within the business and so we hired somebody to come in and really catapult and grow the business. I remember at the time, I just felt really uncomfortable with a lot of the decisions that were being made and the way the business was being run. Then one day, one of our staff took me to one side and said, Sara, I’m really worried that I can see where the business is heading and we’ll get there, it’s just, it won’t be the same business. It won’t be recognisable as the business that we have today.
What they were trying to tell me is that the growth that was being pursued in the business was not in line with the values that we had supporting the business. And that was making my staff feel really uncomfortable.
So all of that is about emotional intelligence. I want you to understand a little bit more about it, reflect on it in your own business and make sure that you are running the business with the right values and you are not letting yours or anyone else’s egos get in the way of what can be a huge business success story.