Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of organisational psychology at University College London and CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, highlighted this fact in an interesting article on the Harvard Business Review website.
He also described the following ways to raise your own EQ and inspire others you communicate with to do the same.
1. Stop fooling yourself
The human personality consists of identity (how we perceive ourselves) and reputation (how we are perceived by others). With EQ, there is often a big difference between these two perspectives. Other people, however, will not usually tell us openly that our EQ is at freezing point.
If you really want to assess the degree of your emotional intelligence and find out where your weaknesses are, listen to feedback and complement it with hard data received from credible personality tests.
2. Start thinking of others
Learn to see things through the eyes of others. Start by revealing the strengths and weaknesses of your team members as well as their opinions. This is best achieved through short but frequent discussions that will show you how to motivate and lead others to better cooperation.
3. Be friendly and selfless
People prefer to work with someone they can trust, who treats them fairly and does not favour only their own interests. Even though pessimism, an ability to criticise openly and provoke confrontation, may help you succeed, it only works in the short term.
If others do not consider working with you rewarding, you will lose their support for your initiatives. If you want help from someone, you must first build mutual relationship based on decency and trust.
4. Tame your passions
Focus on how you behave in extreme situations and how others perceive you in these situations. Do you tend to react too emotionally? Learn to calm down first and react second.
Success lies in finding the triggers of your emotional reactions and consciously focusing on them in stressful situations.
5. Express modesty
This recommendation applies even in cases when you have to pretend modesty. Yes, you may think the people you are dealing with are not the smartest folk on Earth but saying so openly will make you look arrogant.
Successful leaders are able to balance their assertiveness and modesty. They listen to feedback and are able to admit their mistakes. To learn it, they often had to hide their feelings of insecurity, but gradually learned to hide any arrogance.
-kk-