Many supervisors achieve their management position because they have shown great technical skill or/and have significant experience working within a company. As these are characteristics you would like to see in a manager the success of someone in a management role goes beyond technical skills and experience. There are numerous other attributes that an individual needs to be an effective manager. One of these other attributes is emotional intelligence which is a set of skills that enable a person to skillfully manage interactions with others where emotion is involved.
From the above definition I think it is fair to say that in order to be a great manager or leader a certain level of emotional intelligence needs to be held in order to run an effective team. Become a better leader and manager by knowing the different models of emotional intelligence and how yours.
Below is the first post of 4 on emotional intelligence. In this post I will review the model developed by Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer.
Salovey and Mayer’s model
Three main models of emotional intelligence exist. Lets first start with with the men who coined the term "emotional intelligence. Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer created the term "emotional intelligence" a.k.a "EQ" to describe a specific set of abilities that can be used when faced with a situation involving confrontation or disagreement. They best described emotional intelligence as:
"The ability to to perceive emotion, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional meanings and to reflectively regulate emotions in ways that promote emotional and intellectual growth"
These gentleman believed that emotional intelligence was a cognitive ability and is composed of two areas: experimental (ability to perceive, respond, and manipulate emotional information without necessarily understanding it) and strategic (ability to understand and manage emotions without necessarily perceiving feelings well or fully experiencing them)
From here these two areas are broken down into four branches. The first branch is emotional perception, which is the ability to be self-aware of emotions and to express emotions and emotional needs accurately to others. It also includes the ability to distinguish between honest and dishonest emotion. The second branch, emotional assimilation is the ability to distinguish among the different emotions one is feeling and to identify those that are influencing their thought processes. The third branch, emotional understanding, is the ability to understand complex emotions (such as feeling two emotions at once) and the ability to recognize transitions from one to the other. Lastly, the fourth branch, emotion management, is the ability to connect or disconnect from an emotion depending on its usefulness in a given situation.
To test your emotional intelligence take the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test to see where you stand and where your strengths and areas of growth lie. In my next post I will review Dr. Reuven Bar-On model of emotional intelligence.
References:
A Review of the Emotional Intelligence Literature and Implications for Corrections, Yvonne Stys & Shelley L. Brown, Research Branch Correctional Service of Canada
Mohawk College's Performance Management Participant Guide
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