If IQ was enough to make an amazing manager, every team would be led by rocket scientists and doctors. But there’s more that goes into being a manager than rattling off facts and thinking your way through complex problems. That’s why emotional intelligence is so important.
Emotional intelligence is the soft skill equivalent of IQ; it’s about being more aware of your thoughts and emotions and moving through conflict and relationships with empathy and care.
While emotional intelligence is often discussed in the context of personal relationships, it can have a serious impact in the workplace—especially for managers.
Here’s why emotional intelligence is so important for managers and how you can help them build up this important skill.
Why does emotional intelligence matter in the workplace?
Emotional intelligence is a skill used to navigate relationships, handle emotions, and manage social situations.
While it’s such a common term you might be forgiven for thinking it’s always existed, emotional intelligence was popularized by psychologist and author Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. First published in 1995, it breaks down emotional intelligence into these four essential components:
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Social awareness
- Relationship management
Self-awareness
Think of self-awareness a little bit like standing in front of a mirror. Only, instead of checking your hair or making sure you don’t have anything in your teeth, you’re examining your thoughts, your actions, your beliefs, and all the other things that make you, well, you. It’s about knowing your limits, your triggers, your patterns, and your behaviors.
In a way, self-awareness is where emotional intelligence begins. It’s the “knowledge” you need as a foundation to improve in its other aspects.
Self-management
If self-awareness is knowing more about yourself and why you do the things you do, self-management is how you use that knowledge to make those things more productive. Having a rise of anger during a conflict at work and being able to recognize that emotion is self-awareness. Having the ability to prevent that anger from spilling over until you lash out at a coworker is self-management.
Social awareness
At its core, social awareness means understanding how you—and everyone else—fit into specific social situations. Basic levels of social awareness keep us from blurting out every intrusive thought in important meetings. Get a bit more advanced and you can carefully navigate your workplace and make every social setting more positive.
Relationship management
Being able to build, maintain, and improve relationships is a crucial part of emotional intelligence. It means being receptive to the needs of others and knowing when you can meet them—and when you should draw your own boundaries. This is a crucial skill in the workplace since positive relationships help managers get more out of their teams.
Why is emotional intelligence necessary for managers and executives?
A manager who prioritizes IQ and hard skills over everything else will be great at figuring out solutions for your organization’s problems. Unfortunately, they’re not likely to find the right people to make it happen and they’ll have a hard time getting people to follow them.
Managers with robust emotional intelligence can build great teams, rally people around a common cause, and smoothly navigate conflicts when they arise. That makes this an essential skill for any manager or executive.
But what are the specific benefits of building this skill?
A review in the February 2008 issue of the Annual Review of Psychology identified the following:
- Better relationships: Emotional intelligence is essential for navigating relationships and making coworkers and direct reports feel like you care about their wellbeing.
- Better perception: People with high emotional intelligence are usually perceived more positively by their peers. Not too surprising right? If you’re not always flying off the handle and can make every social interaction a positive one, people are more likely to think highly of you.
- Stronger (academic) achievement: Since this was an academic review, it concentrated on academic performance, but it’s not much of a leap to assume this translates to career achievements as well.
- Improved social dynamics at work: If you have the skills to manage your emotions, examine your actions, and take criticism without getting upset, you’ll be a joy to work with. For managers, this leads to better team dynamics, too.
- Stronger negotiating ability: Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is essential in a negotiation. But being self-aware enough to recognize weak points in your perspective can make a big difference, too.
- Better overall well-being: Emotional intelligence creates better relationships at work, leads to better self-management, and is essential to navigating conflict. Are we surprised that it benefits our well-being overall?
If we extrapolate from these benefits to workplace relationships, we can already see how strong emotional intelligence can make a difference:
- With team members: Managers with high emotional intelligence are better equipped to understand and solve the problems their teams run into. They’re also great at rallying people around a common cause.
- With other teams: A manager who relies exclusively on their authority to get things done might struggle and falter when collaborating with other teams. With emotional intelligence, you’ll have an easier time building mutually beneficial partnerships with these teams.
- With leaders: Whether it’s being better at receiving criticism from leaders or getting buy-in for your projects, managers can use emotional intelligence to get what they need while having stronger relationships with leadership.
- With anyone: Emotional intelligence makes you a more positive, engaging person to have around in just about any work environment. Managers with this skill will help foster a healthier work environment, meaning folks will go out of their way to be around them.
Essential elements of emotional intelligence training for managers
It is possible to learn to improve your emotional intelligence by reading books and studying guides. But since emotional intelligence is about how you interact with and situate yourself within a group, you need to work on what you learn with people.
Any program meant to improve emotional intelligence in managers needs to have the following elements:
- It’s thorough: Emotional intelligence is a multi-faceted skill, and building up just one aspect over the others won’t have the impact you’re looking for. Any training you give around emotional intelligence has to account for the full breadth of skills involved.
- It’s flexible: Having a universal training program for emotional intelligence sounds great on paper. It takes fewer resources to set up and you can expect a relatively similar experience across the organization. In practice, however, your emotional intelligence training needs to account for each manager’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as other elements that can affect its efficacy, like neurodivergence and cultural backgrounds.
- Its impact is measurable: As an HR professional looking to build and deploy emotional intelligence training, you’ll need buy-in from the right leaders. Getting that buy-in is a lot easier when you can share metrics that demonstrate that training’s potential impact. A platform like 15Five’s Transform for HR Professionals is perfect for this since it uses data from surveys and performance reviews to identify the managers who need help and track their progress.
- It’s iterative: The first version of your emotional intelligence training program isn’t going to be your last. You’ll want to take the time you need to develop a robust program but do so with the understanding that it’ll be worked on and improved over time.
With that in mind, here are some specific exercises and techniques for improving each aspect of emotional intelligence.
Building self-awareness
There are a few ways you can encourage managers to be more self-aware and promote learning in this area:
- Add self-evaluations for managers: Most organizations have a self-evaluation process for individual collaborators, but few do the same with managers. Having a manager regularly evaluate their strengths and weaknesses is a great way to build their self-awareness.
- Build feedback into what they do: Not all managers go out of their way to ask their team for feedback, and some aren’t really equipped to receive it. By offering a way for teams to give that feedback—anonymously if necessary—you can expose managers to more feedback, helping them find their blind spots.
- Offer training on mindfulness: Mindfulness is an essential part of emotional intelligence. Managers need the ability to pick up on what’s going on around them and how they’re contributing to every conversation.
Improving self-management
Self-management skills will allow managers to be their best selves in more interactions, preventing conflicts and helping tough projects go more smoothly. Here’s how you can help them build this skill:
- Teach them to recognize the influence of their emotions: This can be as simple as giving managers regular prompts for self-reflection asking about situations they feel they didn’t handle as well as they could have. By then diving into their actions and the things that might have motivated them, you give managers better tools for preventing these situations in the future.
- Help them find their “pause” button: Some situations can go beyond even the most emotionally intelligent person. When that happens, we tend to react emotionally when we should step away to collect ourselves. Teach managers how to put a pause on an interaction when needed so things don’t get out of hand.
- Get them to focus on what they can control: Situations we can’t control—and their emotional impact on us—challenge our self-management skills. By teaching managers how to recognize the situations that fall within their sphere of control and those that fall outside of it, you can help them recognize when they should let things go.
Growing social awareness
Social awareness is one of those skills that requires interactions with others to really build. Here are some ways you can facilitate this:
- Encourage more diverse interactions: Some managers can fall into very strict routines when delivering on crucial projects. While this makes them a great asset, it can also limit their social awareness. Hosting events or putting them in situations where they’re expected to interact with people from different teams and backgrounds can help broaden their horizons.
- Promote self-care: Often, a lack of social awareness can just be a sign that someone’s buckling under excessive pressure. Helping managers recognize when this is happening and find ways to take better care of themselves can go a long way.
- Help them become better listeners: Active listening is an important part of social awareness. You can improve listening skills by putting managers in more situations that involve negotiation, setting them up for conversations with leadership, or even running exercises promoting active listening.
Managing relationships more effectively
Relationship building and management is an essential part of being a manager. You can help them build up these skills when you:
- Get them to meet new people: When they’re deep in their day-to-day, managers might interact with the same five or 10 people constantly. After some time, managing these relationships is incredibly easy. Push them out of their comfort zone by making them collaborate with someone they’ve never met before.
- Help them understand personality: There are various ways we class people into different personality groups, from Myers-Briggs to the Big Five. Try having them run tests on this with their teams and working with them to analyze the results. This can help them find out what motivates people and how to build better relationships with them.
- Start with you: As an HR professional, building relationships is part and parcel of your job. So why not take a direct hand in teaching this important skill? Pairing managers with an HR pro for a while can be a great, low-effort way to help your managers learn.
Once more with feeling
Emotional intelligence is an essential skill for managers excited about leading teams of high-performers who feel safe bringing their whole selves to work. It’s part self-awareness and part self-management, with social awareness and relationship management skills playing an important role as well. HR professionals can build training programs that help all managers build this skill through learning, practice, and continuous development. It just takes a bit of work, buy-in from leadership, and an interactive approach. The benefits are more than worth it.
