I’m Emotional and Intelligent but What is Emotional Intelligence?

When you’re running about your day with a mile long “to do” list, it’s unlikely you have the extra time to figure out how everyone is feeling about everything. To you – you’re building a company, developing a product, raising money, trying to find resources and so on. You don’t have the time to focus on the emotional state of being of everyone around you. This is where we make mistakes that stunt the progress of our business.

“You don’t have the time to focus on the emotional state of being of everyone around you. This is where we make mistakes that stunt the progress of our business.” 

What is Emotional Intelligence?

What is emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence is the ability to read and understand your own emotions as well as others’ emotions in the context of a particular situation to maximize the result. It’s not enough to build a product or service and execute sales, manage your marketing and operations. You must also manage the constant human interactions you will have with employees, consultants, vendors, investors, customers and others. The success of these interactions determines how easy and effective—painful or painless—meeting your company’s business goals and your personal goals will be.

Emotional intelligence is about applying the right approach for a particular individual, in a particular moment. This means reading the person, the scene, and anticipating how it will play out. Improving your emotional intelligence is a lifelong endeavor. It requires you to nurture many perspectives including:

• Being aware of your emotions and their effects
• Regulating those emotions
• Understanding your motivations and the motivations of others
• Empathizing with and respecting the feelings and perspectives of others
• Effectively using different communication styles in different situations.

We must develop this skill to better understand, empathize and negotiate with other people.

How to View Emotional Intelligence

How do you get emotional intelligence to be a part of your company culture? Here are a few ways:

• Change Your Perspective – It’s Not Fluff. Entrepreneurs sometimes think that they don’t have time for “fluffy stuff ”—that emotional intelligence is a nice “extra” to have but certainly not a must have. In the early days of the business, when you don’t have the right financial or human resources to put in place normal relationships with employees, vendors, customers, investors and so on, you must be able to drive these constituents under less than ideal conditions. The ability to apply emotional intelligence is a skill that is essential to moving your company forward.
• Think of It As a Key Skill. You must think of emotional intelligence as a skill set no different from raising money, developing marketing strategy, building a product, or learning how to recruit employees. Once you accept its importance and make a commitment to working on this skill, you have to understand that it is not a one size fits all scenario.

Embrace the challenge to become a better entrepreneur by developing your emotional intelligence.

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence

The real trick of emotional intelligence is to be nimble, flexible, and immediately capable of determining what to do in a given situation. This means considering many things simultaneously:

• Your Perspective. Your own emotions and how the influence of the daily pressure, passion, pleasure, pain and stress is affecting your judgment, and those around you. If you don’t acknowledge the “feel” you bring to a scenario, you risk misreading reacting in a way that derails the interaction and ruins your credibility.
• Their Perspective. The emotions and behavior of those across the table from you. Don’t expect everyone to understand your situation. In fact, on the contrary, you must make a conscious effort to understand what others are experiencing and how they’re affected by your actions, reactions to situations and interaction with them. Put yourself in their shoes.
• The Situation. The “table” or situation itself. Are you negotiating a potential deal that you need to happen quickly with partners who are particularly slow and cautious in their investment decisions? Are you talking an employee that is feeling the strain of burning the midnight oil?

Taking all these factors into account – and getting to the point where that process is second nature – is your goal.

The Blender: Which Button to Push

It always helped me to think of emotional intelligence as a blender. Blenders provide you with many different buttons to push—chop, blend, dice, puree, liquefy, crush, grind, mix, fluff, whip, beat. As an entrepreneur, you will be making decisions throughout the day. Different ingredients will be added to the mix. Different people. Different situations. Different pressures. Different implications. Different personalities. The key to emotional intelligence is determining which button to press in which situation.

When emotional intelligence is embraced and applied by the leader, the company’s (scarce) resources often experience exponential growth: a “one plus one equals three” effect. Company activities—meetings, communications, process—seem to get easier. Each time you pick the right button on the blender, you will advance the business and your own leadership skills.