This Valentine’s Day, it’s time to invest in emotional intelligence

Valentine’s is the one time in the year when it’s deemed OK to talk openly about our feelings, yet we all know that it’s emotions that rule every waking second of our lives, 365 days a year.

The organisations, teams and individuals who are standing tall and successfully riding the wave of challenging times are those that have chosen to think, act and behave differently. It’s not IQ that led them down this path, it’s their emotional intelligence.

Travis Bradbury actively calls out that 90% of top performers have strong EQ and for each point of EQ released there’s a positive impact on results. If EQ is 58% of job performance, as Bradbury’s findings claim, organisations need to rigorously focus their capability development on EQ rather than its easier-to-buy but less powerful brother, IQ.

So, what exactly is EQ in business? In layman’s terms, it’s the capability to:

• recognise and understand our emotions and reactions (self-awareness)
• manage, control, and adapt our emotions, mood, reactions, and responses (self-management)
• harness our emotions to motivate ourselves to take appropriate action, commit, follow-through, and work toward the achievement of our goals (motivation)
• discern the feelings of others, understand their emotions, and utilise that understanding to relate to others more effectively (empathy)
• build relationships, relate to others in social situations, lead, negotiate conflict, and work as part of a team (social skills)
• emotional Intelligence underpins how people and relationships function across internal and external stakeholder groups. The stronger the relationship, the bigger the results.

It’s time to get the right balance on capability spending between IQ and EQ and set your teams up for success by unleashing their emotional intelligence.

Let’s use this Valentine’s Day as a prompt to reconsider how we can get that smile and spark back into our professional relationships with staff, colleagues, clients and customers.

Find out how Quantic can help with building powerful relationships here.