In recent times, emotional intelligence has gained considerable attention in the workplace and has become the hallmark of effective leaders. Small business owners with high emotional intelligence deeply connect, collaborate, and know how to communicate with their team members to achieve and exceed business goals. In today’s podcast, Candance Mae from Candace Mae Training and Services and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the power of emotional intelligence and developing leaders.
Summary
The Power of Emotional Intelligence and Developing Leaders
Emotional intelligence is an indispensable aspect of leadership, and every business owner should strive to develop EQ skills for the effective operations of their companies. In fact, about 80-90% of leadership is based on emotional intelligence. Hence, as a business owner, having a high emotional intelligence allow you to become more effective and make informed business decisions that affect your bottom line.
Leaders with emotional intelligence can recognize and solve their teams’ problems pretty quickly, build long-lasting relationships, develop a positive work culture in their organization, make the right decisions in difficult times and motivate their employees.
Unfortunately, emotional intelligence barely comes to the mind of many entrepreneurs when building a small business, making them have difficulty running their companies. With this in mind, this piece intends to walk you through emotional intelligence, its various components, and how you can develop it to set your business apart from competitors.
What Is Emotional Intelligence in Small Business Leadership?
The most effective small business owners are those that factor in emotional intelligence and consider it a critical leadership skill. That said, emotional intelligence in small business leadership refers to the ability of entrepreneurs to understand and manage their emotions and recognize and control others’ emotions.
Emotional intelligence has become more important than ever as the tasks of leadership in small businesses are increasingly becoming more complex. Plus, the modern concept of leadership has gone beyond management, authority, and control. Moreover, today’s employees want to work in an organization that shows empathy, care, love, and concern. 
What Are the Components of Emotional Intelligence?
Understanding what constitutes emotional intelligence (EI) is central to running a successful business. Plus, it will help you know how you can develop each element for optimal leadership in your business.
Below are the various segments of emotional intelligence that every small business owner should strive to imbibe:
- Self Awareness
- Self Regulation
- Relationship Management
- Social Awareness
Self Awareness
As a small business owner, you should be able to understand your strength and weaknesses. In other words, you must figure out what you know and the ones you don’t know and then leverage your strengths while working on your defects. Self-awareness allows you to control your emotion and help you understand how they affect your team members.
When you have self-awareness, you can guide and influence your team and bring out the best in them, which will increase productivity.
Self Regulation
Self-regulation refers to your ability to manage emotions in the face of adversities and difficulties. It’s an essential aspect of leadership that allows you to maintain calmness even when your business is in the most challenging situation.
Business leaders with self-regulation manage their emotions and temperaments and avoid chaotic decisions that can impact their businesses negatively. You can’t afford to lose your cool when things don’t go as planned. When you stay calm, unruffled, and positive, you can think clearly about how to fix a bad situation and communicate to your team members in a clear fashion.
Social Awareness
Your company does not operate in a vacuum; therefore, you must be conscious of the people that help you in running your business. Social awareness means that you should consider the perspectives, feelings, and emotions of people that work with you and apply that understanding while relating with them.
To become a successful business leader, you must be socially aware of your workplace. Social awareness helps you share information, communicate, and collaborate effectively with others. Leaders with social awareness practice empathy and show interest in their team members’ concerns. Understanding what your employees are going through will allow you to tune into their emotions and connect more with them on a personal level.
Relationship Management
You can’t be working so hard to keep your business running while your relationships suffer. After all, people manage every aspect of your business, and maintaining a healthy relationship with them is critical for you to get the most out of them. In addition, building a robust relationship with your team members will minimize the chances of conflict and increase job satisfaction and employee retention.
With this in mind, you must aim to connect more with your employees by scheduling an occasional informal meeting.
What are the Ways to Develop Emotional Intelligence?
A lack of emotional intelligence could have far-reaching consequences on your small business; hence you should prioritize developing your emotional intelligence. Below are the ways you can develop your emotional intelligence skills:
Keep Track of Your Daily Behaviour
Ensure you take a record of your thoughts, feelings, reactions, and more at the end of the workday. By taking note of these, you will understand specific patterns in your attitude.
Ask yourself some salient questions: where did you do well? How did your actions affect your team members’ feelings? Are there certain situations, things, or people that upset you? The more you become intentional about your daily behavior and how you interact with people, the more you will significantly improve your EQ skills.
Leverage Active Listening
Listening is a critical aspect of communication, but many people lack listening skills. According to Psychology Today, just about 10 percent of people know how to listen effectively. We tend to be easily distracted by our thoughts, phones, noise, and the response we want to give to the person speaking to us.
However, to be an emotionally intelligent leader, you must be an active listener by learning how to focus on what the speaker is saying and show you’re engaged by using non-verbal cues. By so doing, you will easily connect with them and understand their thoughts and feelings.
Meditation
Meditation decreases stress and improves emotional intelligence. You can consider bringing out some minutes, let’s ten minutes, every day to meditate.
Meditation increases your focus and enables you to make better decisions to improve your business.
Hire a Coach
A coach can help you level up your emotional intelligence and achieve your leadership goals.
Engaging the service of a perfect coach can make a world of difference as they will help you brainstorm, manage and implement strategies that dramatically shape the leadership skills that help you run a successful business.
Learn About Our Guest
Candace Mae is an International best-selling author of the book Heaven Within Restoring Wholeness for Better Leadership. Candace believes that to achieve and exceed goals, we must communicate and collaborate at a world-class level. She has decades of corporate experience and inexhaustible love for life and the Lord, Candace Mae spends her time now as a consultant, mentor, executive coach, workshop facilitator, and keynote speaker.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured small business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in fraud cases), making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often use their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for business investment, especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
