Emotional Intelligence in workplace

Emotional intelligence or EI is defined as 'the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and others around you. People with a high level of emotional intelligence understand their own feeling and know how it can affect others.

According to an American psychologist Daniel Goleman, from an emotional intelligence perspective, there are five desirable qualities of a leader:

1. Self-awareness: understand your emotions and know how your emotions and actions can affect people around you. Regarding leadership position, it indicates that you have an in-depth understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. 

2. Self-regulation: keep your self in control. In a leadership perspective, it reflects a leader's flexibility and accountability. 

3. Motivation: motivate yourself to work. If a leader is self-motivated, he or she would work consistently toward the goals and have high standards for the quality of work. 

4. Empathy: put yourself in someone else's situation. An empathic leader helps developing people on the team, give constructive feedback and listen to others. 

5. Social skills: it includes communication, managing changes and resolving conflicts in a diplomatic way. 

During my work,  I have seen leaders demonstrating these good qualities and they have been good leaders. Through my work and other experience, I have developed a high level of emotional intelligence, which assisted me in the current role.

From my perspective, the three important qualities that self-awareness, motivation and empathy. 

I am self-motivated and I motivated myself to work towards my goals. For example, I would like to work in building-related projects, and I learnt about Green Star and became a Green Star Associate, so I have a better understanding of building-related projects. I believe that if I find the right direction and I work towards that, I will eventually achieve my goal.

I am an empathic person. As a team member, I always check that everyone is OK. In addition, I have suggested that we have a meeting schedule and keep every meeting short and succinct. As the one who initiated this, I took the responsibility of creating a meeting schedule, taking the meeting minutes, and sharing them afterwards. Once there was a team member who was sick, and the project would be due in two days. I send an email to him, telling him to take rest and hope that he can recover, and I took on the extra workload to make sure that the project can be finished on time. 

I have strong self-awareness, which means I am aware of my weaknesses and strengths, and I acknowledge my feelings and know how to deal with them. My biggest weakness is not confident, and I have been working on it through attending workshops about public speaking and presentation and actively participating in a group presentation. Since I have strong communication skills and interpersonal skills, I have played an active role in managing team bonding activities, communicating with team members and allocating tasks accordingly. 

Reference:

https://www.stoodnt.com/blog/encouraging-employbility-series-article-2-emotional-intelligence/