Youth Incorporated Magazine

Achievement in a professional environment takes more than the right education and knowledge from books. Associations and the cognizant, achievement-oriented directors need a good level of “Emotional Quotient” to be fruitful. Without proper soft skills and a good display of emotional intelligence, climbing the career ladder becomes a tad difficult. 

This may happen because though you may have the essential technical skills if you lack the knowledge as to how to give and receive feedback or how to keep your team motivated or where exactly to draw the line between professional and personal lives, it can become an obstacle in your growth at work.

So now let’s check out what Emotional Quotient is? 

It is the ability to identify and manage personal emotions and the emotions of others.  Emotional Quotient (EQ) is as vital as intellectual ability (IQ). In the business field, work pressure, nervousness, worker’s pressure, agitation, wretchedness or irritability all are identified with the various forms of emotional intelligence. All these symptoms could harm an employee’s performance. How an employee handles such situations determines whether he/she is capable of coping with work-related challenges or not. 

Please note that emotional intelligence is a part of emotional quotient. According to Dr. K. Soniya, “Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and express emotion, simulate emotion in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in oneself and others. Emotional Intelligence represents a set of competencies that allow us to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions in ourselves and in others. These emotional competencies are learned capabilities based on emotional intelligence that lead to superior performance.”  

According to the journalist Daniel Goleman and his colleagues, EI can be organised into four dimensions. They are

1.Self Awareness

It means knowing your values, your needs, personality etc. It’s important to be self-aware because when it gives us a better understanding of ourselves and when we achieve that we can experience ourselves as a unique individual. 

2. Self Management

In simple terms it means self-control, some may think as being your own boss. This essentially means that you have to have a check on the activities you are doing and how efficiently you are doing a particular task. It’s an essential skill to have as it helps in contributing to a better work environment for you and the co-workers.  

3. Social Awareness

It’s the ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others from different backgrounds and cultures. It is also about understanding your colleague’s emotions, adapting to the situations and providing the needed response. It’s critical to be socially aware in a working environment as it gives you a chance to provide a rational response to the situation. 

4. Emotional Quotient

It has already been explained above. 

Now let’s consider why Emotional Intelligence is the need of the hour:

In the workplace, it is inevitable that almost each and every employee would get upset, angry, or have a bad day. So your value in the office will only be evaluated if you are able to handle these situations in a better way. At times, you may have observed that in-office meetings people talk over each other, now if you have the emotional intelligence you would be able to control the situation. 

In this day and age where everything is so fast, not only IQ is important, EQ plays a far greater role.