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Improve Your Leadership Skills with Emotional intelligence

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As project managers, we don’t simply manage work, deliverables, and documentation – we lead and support the people on our project teams. Emotional intelligence (also known as Emotional Quotient or EQ) helps us do that. Here’s how enhancing your EQ can help:

  • Relate to people working from home. Working with others is challenging even when you work side by side. Interacting with people onscreen amps up the level of difficulty. Although some people work from home and love it, others wish they were in the office. EQ helps you relate to and support your team members through their struggles. Your supportive leadership makes all your team members feel more comfortable with their work environment, which means a better chance of meeting project objectives.
  • Deal with people under stress. Stress creates obstacles for project managers and can significantly decrease project success. Stress often arises from business challenges like reactive decisions, irrational or missing responses to project problems, and fear about speaking the truth regarding project difficulties. With solid EQ, you will be able to recognize the root cause of these issues. Work through stressors with your stakeholders to ease their minds and deliver project outcomes.  
  • Manage excessive workload. Many businesses suffer from too many concurrent projects, competing operational responsibilities and being short-staffed – whether in your business or third parties you contract with. Pushing a schedule and managing to deadlines doesn’t guarantee progress. To negotiate deadlines and obtain staff to complete tasks, you need to understand the delivery pressure others are under – and that takes EQ.
  • Work across cultures. Project managers often work with people from different cultures, whether they represent different geographic regions in your country or different countries altogether. We are all human and have the same emotions behind our reactions. However, how emotions are triggered can vary across cultures. The higher your EQ, the more you will recognize these emotional triggers and the signals indicating the presence of emotions. That enhances your ability to work with stakeholders, no matter their cultural background. 
  • Apply change management if needed. Success goes beyond delivering project deliverables. For example, installed software doesn’t represent a successful result if the client isn’t tech-savvy and requires training and support to achieve the desired benefits. You might need to apply change management to achieve business outcomes, which requires skill, leadership expertise, and EQ. Whether you perform change management or depend on change managers, you need to understand what drives successful change management, which takes EQ.

For more about Emotional Intelligence, check out Gemma Leigh-Roberts Developing Your Emotional Intelligence course and Britt Andreatta’s Leading with Emotional Intelligence course.