As you continue your journey in leadership, you will face many issues that challenge your ability to remain calm and collected while you make decisions and solve problems. Learning to address these issues draws from your emotional intelligence. Growing your emotional intelligence plays an important role in developing healthy relationships, communicating clearly and effectively, and achieving team success.
Factors that influence emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence depends on:
- Identifying, understanding, and managing your own emotions,
- Recognizing and empathizing with the emotions of others, and
- Adjusting or modifying your response to situations to best fit both the situation and the emotions and perspectives of others.
The good news about emotional intelligence is that you can grow it by focused and intentional thought and action. It is more skill set and mindset than it is raw ability. Growing your emotional intelligence is worth the effort because it is vital for effective decision making, problem solving, and conflict resolution. By developing your emotional intelligence, you can more easily navigate challenging situations.
Controlling your anger
One important aspect of high emotional intelligence is learning to control – or at least effectively direct – your anger. A key first step in controlling your anger is learning to recognize the difference between a business problem and a personal frustration.
As an individual contributor, you can likely find a safe place to vent your personal frustrations created by interactions with team members, customers, supervisors, and vendors. It is natural to experience frustration or annoyance in the workplace. As a leader, though, it becomes increasingly important to differentiate between business problems and personal frustrations. Business problems need to be quickly resolved so that the team can move forward. Your personal frustration does not necessarily need to be addressed or resolved by the team. It is important to remember that your personal frustration is not a business problem.
Business problems are objective challenges that hinder organizational progress. Things like missed deadlines, budget constraints, or communication breakdowns are business problems. On the other hand, personal frustrations are your emotional responses triggered by your perception of or reaction to a specific situation. It is important to recognize the distinction to respond appropriately.
How to manage personal frustrations
Is it okay to have personal frustrations? Yes. Is it okay to verbalize personal frustrations? It depends. Based on the situation, the people present, what their relationship is to you, what the power dynamic is between you and them and many other factors, it might be okay, or not.
Business problems must be identified, surfaced, clearly articulated, and resolved so that the team can move forward. They likely involve other members of the team and can be freely shared in the interest of improving team performance.
Personal frustrations are exactly that – personal. They can feel as intense and urgent as business problems, and – in most cases – they lie in the realm of things that you likely need to resolve on your own rather than venting to your team.
Recognizing the difference between business problems and personal frustrations can help you to better control and direct your anger in appropriate and helpful ways rather than in hurtful and damaging ways. The next time you evaluate a situation to decide on a course of action, first stop and ask yourself this question: is this a business problem or a personal frustration? Then, act accordingly.
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