Build Your Emotional Intelligence for Career and Life Success

By Seif Bello, Operations Engineer, ONEOK

Emotional intelligence is an important skill that can help you achieve success in your professional career and personal life. Studies have shown that over 80% of people with high emotional intelligence are high performers (1). Despite its importance, it is not emphasized in our educational system. Graduates often enter the workforce not knowing anything about emotional intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to learn or understand. Emotional intelligence will help you understand emotions within yourself and in others. Emotions are derivations of five core feelings: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and shame (1). Everyone exhibits one or more of these emotions during the course of a day. The good news is emotional intelligence skills can be acquired and nurtured.

Step 1: Understand and Manage Yourself

Many of us work in project teams, often on several projects at once. To work effectively together, team members need to understand one another. But how can you understand others if you don’t understand yourself?  

The key to self-understanding lies in developing a keen sense of self-awareness and self-management. When you can recognize your own emotions in the moment, you can control and direct your behavior positively and this will result in a deliberate outcome from the interaction (1).

Imagine this: you leave your family for a work assignment at a remote site that involves testing a new system. When you arrive, you see the system is not ready for testing. You start breathing heavily and getting upset. You may even yell profanities at the vendor responsible for providing a complete product. Then you leave still angry that the system is not ready for testing.

Clearly, in this example you did not exhibit self-awareness and self-management. Although the system wasn’t ready storming off the site didn’t fix the issue – and likely made it worse.

Here’s how the situation could play out differently: You arrive at the site and note the system deficiencies. Deep inside you are not happy, but you recognize your own emotions. Instead of losing your cool, you proceed to present the deficiencies to the vendor. Then you and the vendor agree on a path forward and deadline to complete the test.

This example illustrates how powerful and useful self-awareness and self-management can be in our daily interactions. You can practice the following strategies can help improve your self-awareness and self-management:

• Spot your emotions in books, movies and music

• Feel your emotions physically

• Breathe; learn how to calm down

• Sleep on it

Step 2: Understand and Manage Others

The second part of the emotional intelligence equation is understanding and managing others. The ability to read others’ emotions accurately can help you manage interactions successfully (1). This requires listening and observing intently during your interactions with others. On average, we spend half of our typical business day listening (2), which presents ample opportunities to improve our emotional intelligence. If you need further resources on how to become a better listener, check out the “Listen Up!” article in the December 2017 CEP issue.

Let’s replay the earlier example, this time practicing the art of understanding and managing others: After you arrive onsite and realize that the system cannot be tested, you seek to understand what went wrong and show empathy to the vendor personnel working on the system issues. As a result, those individuals feel less defensive and understand you will work collaboratively to fix the issues.

Practice the following social awareness and relationship management strategies to expand your ability to understand and manage others:

• The art of listening

• Taking feedback well

• Only getting mad on purpose

• Explaining your decisions, not just making them

Closing thoughts

In the professional world, we have many different interactions, ranging from a one-on-one meeting such as a performance evaluation, to a multidisciplinary group gathering (e.g., a process hazard analysis). In each of these, successful interactions drive progress and results. Likewise, in our personal relations, the quality of our lives is based on the quality of our communications (3). Practicing and perfecting your own emotional intelligence as discussed in this article can help you improve your interactions and build career and personal success.

 Citations 

1. Bradberry, T., and J. Greaves, “Emotional Intelligence 2.0,” TalentSmart, Inc., San Diego, CA (2009).

2. Smith, B. D., and N. Bishop, “Listen Up,” Chemical Engineering Progress,113 (12), pp 43-46 (Dec. 2017).

3. Hollis, A., ed., “AIChE SmartBrief,” https://www2.smartbrief.com/servlet/ArchiveServlet?issueid=D95B67AD-9882... (Nov.14 2017)