Emotional intelligence is all about how well you understand yourself, the people around you and what makes them tick. And it can be one of the most effective ways to enhance your management skills.
Executive coaching uses many techniques, but when it comes down to working with clients on their emotional intelligence, here are four key steps that can help you get started:
Self-awareness
Self-management
Social awareness
Relationship management
For most people, the goal of executive coaching is to improve leadership skills or deal with a specific workplace challenge. However, emotional intelligence is often an underappreciated source of untapped potential in our work lives.
It makes sense when you think about it. If emotional intelligence can have such a profound impact on your personal life, imagine what it could do for your career! Not only will you be better at managing your emotions in all kinds of situations, but you’ll also excel at inspiring and motivating others around you to do their best work too!
Let’s look at each step-in detail:
Step 1: Self-awareness
What are my triggers? Why does this upset me? Why did I do that?
First, you need to understand your own emotions and how they affect your decisions, behavior, and interactions with others. Executive coaching programs will help you identify the feelings that are limiting your performance or damaging relationships at work. This is where many people falter because they don’t think of themselves as emotional beings who influence events rather than being at effect of them. You may be surprised by what you discover about yourself if you explore your emotions more closely.
The first step is about understanding what makes you tick on an emotional level so that you can develop greater self-awareness. This awareness can then give rise to motivation for change, which leads into the second step.
Scenario: Many people have deep-rooted insecurities, fears and limiting beliefs that they don’t even recognize are running their lives. And until you become aware of them, it’s like having blinders on that prevent you from seeing the world clearly.
How can executive coaching help?
Executive coaching can help you identify the push and pull factors that influence your behavior. It provides a safe environment to explore why you do what you do and how this affects those around you. You’ll be able to build on strengths and develop strategies for managing weaknesses in your emotional intelligence skillset. Executive coaching is much faster than therapy because the coach-client relationship is focused solely on achieving results rather than exploring personal history or long-term issues that are unrelated to work life. Instead of wasting weeks, months or even years sorting through past issues, executive coaching allows individuals to tackle problems in real time so they can move forward more quickly with their careers.
Step 2: Self-management
How can I stay composed when others around me seem so frazzled?
The second step in the process is all about managing the emotions that arise from your awareness of yourself but also from understanding how you can create more positive feelings when under pressure at work. This is where life gets really interesting because people have a tendency to think they know themselves, but often they don’t recognize what makes them happy or successful until it’s pointed out in a structured way. You may not even realize that your behavior and approach to work or relationships are limiting you until you’re shown another perspective. Emotional intelligence coaching helps you take control of these dynamics by getting clear about values and goals for moving forward in life and work once self-awareness has been achieved. In essence, self-management is concerned with how you direct your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
When you know yourself better, it affects everything because the decisions you make are more likely to be grounded in confidence rather than fear. Similarly, if you can identify what makes other people tick at work or at home, this will improve relationships and teamwork. Self-awareness then becomes the springboard into self-management that enables you to take control of your emotional responses to situations by thinking about them differently.
Scenario: If you’re someone who shies away from conflict, you may not speak up in team meetings even if you think it’s what your boss wants. You avoid speaking frankly because you fear that others might judge or ignore your ideas. Rather than speaking up, you opt to play it safe and remain quiet when in fact there could be a negative consequence downstream for remaining mum and forgoing an opportunity to contribute. If instead, the skills of emotional intelligence coaching were used to look at this dilemma in a different way by thinking about how your behavior is affecting others and whether they would appreciate your feedback, then self-management can become much more effective at work.
How can executive coaching help?
Executive coaching provides the opportunity for you to explore your individual drivers and how they impact on your behaviors in business. It can help you develop a set of proactive strategies that help you manage these emotional challenges. Instead of being reactive, which often results in stress, anxiety or distraction at work, self-management is all about staying present in the moment so that when big problems arise it’s possible to remain focused on solutions rather than getting caught up in what might have been avoided with greater awareness.
Step 3: Social awareness
What are the things that others are thinking, feeling, wanting, and needing?
The next step in the process is to enhance your interpersonal intelligence so that you can recognize what’s going on for everyone around you. When you become more socially aware, it makes it much easier to understand where people are coming from. This means being able to pick up on their moods, reactions and behaviors which creates an environment where ongoing feedback is both possible and appropriate. You then become a better communicator because social awareness gives rise to self-awareness about how others might perceive things if they were standing in your shoes. It all starts with focusing on other people rather than yourself.
As you develop greater levels of empathy recognizing how certain emotions might affect others on an emotional level, you also become more perceptive to their needs and wants. As a result, people not only trust you more but they’re also willing to open up because it feels safe to do so. You may be surprised by how much this is the case with your family or friends first of all, but also at work.
Scenario: If you’re someone who has difficulty staying present in conversations, for example, only looking out for yourself and getting your point across, it might be time to think about whether others feel heard. Are there occasions when others choose not to share their thoughts because they sense that you’re only interested in what’s going on with you? It may seem like a subtle shift but by tuning into people around you and making them feel safe to express themselves at work or home, the relationships you form will become much deeper and meaningful.
How can executive coaching help?
Building relationships is about communicating with empathy. Enhancing your social awareness can be done through a range of different exercises, including body language training, voice tone coaching and the use of effective questioning skills. By learning to communicate on an emotional level it opens up more possibilities for you to build rapport with others and enhances your ability to influence people.
Step 4: Relationship management
How can I influence change in others without them feeling like they are under attack?
The final step involves developing skills that lead to better relationships which ultimately means greater career satisfaction too. This is the point where individuals realize that getting on well with different kinds of people doesn’t just happen, it requires effort and time invested in building rapport with others whether it’s for business or pleasure. Relationship management enables you to work with others more constructively, which is especially important when conflict arises amongst the people you deal with on a regular basis. The bottom line here is that if you’re influenced by feelings like anger, anxiety, and sadness more than rationality, your judgement is likely to be flawed rather than balanced.
Individuals who are better at managing relationships also understand how they fit into the social landscape of an organization or set of relationships. They’ve got good awareness about the power dynamics present so they can adapt their behavior accordingly. If someone has authority over them at work for example, this person may need to be given respect whether they deserve it or not so that rapport can be built up effectively. By understanding what motivates people in different situations and how to manage relationships accordingly, you become more flexible as a leader.
Flexible leadership skills such as relationship management combined with emotional intelligence will almost certainly lead to career advancement opportunities. Conversely, those who only see the value in two of the four steps to emotional intelligence are likely to remain stagnant because they lack self-awareness and social awareness which can be equally important.
Scenario: A new co-worker has started and is causing you problems. You want to go to their manager and complain about them, but your boss tells you that you need to be more emotionally intelligent.
How can executive coaching help?
Executives benefit from coaching when they’re in transition and need executive coaching to help them make a career move or take a new position. Executive coaches can also be useful for executives that have been in their careers for a long time but find themselves stuck in the same place.
Conclusion:
For any leader looking for ways to improve their emotional intelligence and therefore overall leadership effectiveness, we encourage you to take an online executive coaching course or even consider working with an executive coach. Those who do so often find that it boosts their confidence which then has a knock-on effect on other people at work simply due to the positive effect it has on your approachability and likeability.
Emotional intelligence is quite possibly the most important quality that can be learned by a leader or anyone who wants to lead. Highly emotionally intelligent individuals know what they’re feeling and how this affects people around them which leads to more effective communication and better relationships through improved empathy, effective listening skills, and social awareness. Leadership is all about influencing others positively rather than negatively, so an emotionally intelligent approach is invaluable in almost every situation imaginable whether it’s at home or work.