It shouldn’t be news to anyone by now that emotional intelligence, sometimes referred to as EQ, is a fundamental skill for professional success. Technical skills, intelligence, and overall competence may get you in the door, but rising to the top requires the more nuanced, relational and interpersonal skills encompassed by EQ.
In order to harness EQ in the workplace, it’s important to understand the key components of emotional intelligence, how they affect success, and how they can be improved.
What Are the Components of Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the measure of your ability to perceive and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It affects how we manage behaviors, navigate social situations, and make decisions.
While many skills contribute to emotional intelligence, there are 4 key components of EQ: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. These components pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence. Personal competence is the ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your actions, while social competence is the ability to understand other people’s moods, behaviors, and motives in order to maintain good relationships. Self-awareness and self-management are personal competence skills, while social awareness and relationship management are social competence skills.
The 4 Components of Emotional Intelligence:
Now that we know the 4 components of EQ, let’s explore each one in-depth.
Self-Awareness
The first level of emotional intelligence is self-awareness, which is the ability to accurately perceive your own emotions in the moment and understand your tendencies across situations. Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich shows that only about 10 to 15% of people are self-aware, which is a far cry from the 95% of people who think they are self-aware.
Self-awareness involves the following skills:
- Understanding your typical reactions to specific events, challenges, and people
- Tolerating the discomfort of negative emotions in order to quickly make sense of them when they come up
- Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, what motivates and satisfies you, and which people and situations push your buttons
As the foundational component of EQ, self-awareness makes the other three levels of emotional intelligence possible. Fortunately, simply thinking about self-awareness helps to improve the skill, and improving self-awareness makes improving the rest of the components of emotional intelligence easier.
Increased self-awareness has several benefits, such as enhanced life satisfaction and better work performance–in fact, according to our founders’ best-selling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, 83% of top performers are high in self-awareness.
Self-Management
The second level of emotional intelligence is self-management, which is the ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior positively.
Self-management is made up of the following skills:
- Effectively managing your emotional reactions to situations and people
- Tolerating uncertainty in high-emotion or stressful situations in order to understand your emotions and explore the best way to move forward
- Putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals
A simple way to improve self-management is to pause in the midst of stressful situations and do what you need to do in order to manage your emotions before making decisions. By taking a step back and getting a handle on what you’re feeling, you’ll move from simply reacting to intentionally responding.
Social Awareness
The third level of emotional intelligence, social awareness, is the ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them.
Social Awareness skills include the following:
- Perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling, even if you don’t feel the same way
- Listening well and observing what is going on around you
- Preventing your own thoughts and feelings from getting in the way of observing others
To improve social awareness, start by just listening to others around you, with the goal of understanding them and their feelings better. This is the essence of empathy, a key aspect of social awareness.
Relationship Management
The fourth level of emotional intelligence, relationship management, builds on the other three EQ components. Relationship management is the ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully.
Skills that make up relationship management include:
- Seeing the benefit of connecting with different types of people, even those you’re not fond of
- Seeking to understand others and treat them well
- Prioritizing clear communication and effective handling of conflict
Relationship management is particularly important for those in leadership positions. If you don’t establish strong relationships with the people you are leading, you won’t gain the respect and trust you need to lead them well.
One way to improve relationship management is to practice handling conflict head-on. While it may seem easier to ignore interpersonal problems and focus on the work at hand, unresolved conflict hinders group cohesion and decreases productivity, and addressing it will strengthen relationships and lead to more positive outlooks and outcomes.
Increase Your Overall EQ By Mastering the 4 Components
The best way to start mastering the 4 components of emotional intelligence is to get an accurate assessment of where your EQ skills are currently. With proper insight into your competence in each of the EQ components, you can begin to target the specific skills that need improvement.
TalentSmartEQ’s industry-leading assessments have been completed by more than 2 million people across the globe. Our Emotional Intelligence Appraisal – Self Edition measures your overall EQ score and identifies areas of strength and opportunity across the 4 core EQ skills and 28 specific behaviors. Our Multi-Rater and 360° Editions provide valuable feedback on how you are perceived by others and identify gaps between your self-perception and the perceptions of others to help you prioritize key areas to develop.
If you would like to bring EQ training to your workplace, we have a range of EQ solutions, trainer certification programs, coaching, and other resources to help your organization harness the power of EQ. Contact us to find out how to get started.