The Overlooked Skill

The importance of investing in emotional intelligence

What are the most important skills someone needs to be hired or receive a promotion?

The exact answer will differ based on your organisation, but more often than not it is a person’s technical ability, previous experience or expertise that gets them the job. And while all of these are necessary, our focus on technical capabilities runs the risk of us neglecting the equally important ‘soft skills’.

This can be costly for the individual and the organisation. Consider the following example:

Sam is one of the top performers in his department and as a result he is promoted to a management position. However, upon starting the role, he feels increasingly overwhelmed with the workload, receive complaints about how he speaks to others, and struggles to resolve conflict within the team. As tensions build, key deadlines are missed, 2 team members leave and Sam feels isolated from the group.

We are all aware of people like Sam who are promoted due to their excellent work and experience in the role, but who quickly find themselves drowning in office politics, conflict and pressure. Why? Because they haven’t been trained in how to manage people. Someone can spend years learning and practicing the technical requirements for their role, but managing others requires the completely different, and often overlooked skillset of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence refers to a set of emotional and social skills that collectively establish how well we: perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way. A lack of emotional intelligence can result in poorer communication, conflict management, resilience and decision making. All of which ultimately contribute to poorer leadership performance.

So, how do we prevent this from happening? The solution is to invest in emotional intelligence training from an early stage in people’s careers.

Going back to Sam, if he previously invested in his emotional intelligence, he would be better equipped to manage his team effectively, with emotional and social skills such as:

• Emotional Self-Awareness: By understanding his emotions and the impact they can have on others, Sam would be aware of how he comes across to other people, and adjust his behaviours accordingly.

• Empathy: Sam would be able to appreciate how other people in the team are feeling about a situation and be sensitive to their different needs when handling challenging conversations or disputes.

• Stress Tolerance: When dealing with the demands and pressure of their new role, Sam would be able to draw upon a variety of strategies to help him manage stress and remain resilient in the face of setbacks.

Emotional intelligence shouldn’t be an afterthought, but rather something to be developed alongside other workplace skills. Whether this takes the form of structured training programmes, 1-2-1 coaching sessions or individual learning; the cost of overlooking emotional intelligence is far greater than any investment you make.

If you would like to start investing in emotional intelligence, our Emotional Intelligence Development Programme is designed for professionals looking to understand and develop their emotional intelligence. Learn more here.

You can also read more about emotional intelligence on our website, or contact us to learn more about how to develop emotional intelligence within your organisation.