Inclusive culture - Emotional Intelligence
What Emotional Intelligence is
Emotional intelligence is a person's ability to understand and manage their own emotions, and to understand and positively influence the emotions of others.
At least, thats the gist of it. Emotional Intelligence, sometimes referred to as Emotional Quotient, or EQ for short, is difficult to nail down with a comprehensive and precise definition. For many people, there will always be intangible components, and aspects that are hard to capture with words.
At thoughtbot, we have endeavored to define EI in a way that espouses our culture of inclusivity. We seek to continuously improve this definition, our understanding of it, and our expression of it. Ultimately, we would like to enact and inspire positive change in the world through our inclusive culture. This journey is not ours alone, and we invite you to contribute.
Emotional Intelligence can be described as a composition of the following competencies and skills:
Personal Competence
Personal Competence describes a person's self-awareness and self-management skills. It is the ability to stay aware of one's emotions, and how one's behavior is influenced by them. Personal competency focuses more on the self, rather than how the self interacts with others.
Self Awareness - the ability to accurately perceive one's own emotions, and maintaining awareness of them as they happen.
Self Management - as it relates to EI, is the ability to use awareness of one's emotions to stay flexible and positively direct one's behavior.
Social Competence
Social Competence describes a person's social awareness and relationship management skills. It is the ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and motives in order to improve the quality of one's relationships.
Social Awareness - as it relates to EI, is one's ability to accurately detect someone else's emotional state. Accurate detection requires a state of empathy and compassion, and does not involve assumptions or judgments.
Relationship Management - within the scope of EI, is the ability to use awareness of emotional states to successfully and positively manage interactions.
EQ and IQ
IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, was once believed to be an indicator of performance and potential success in one's role. Over time, it has been demonstrated that job performance and success are much more closely linked to EQ. IQ is also regarded as a fixed trait, while EQ is a set of flexible skills that can be grown over time.
EQ has a proven value for businesses. The fact that it can be grown and enhanced over time implies that businesses are burdened with opportunity cost when not developing a culture that is EQ focused.
Leadership
Skilled leaders bring out the best in people. Emotional Intelligence is required to accurately understand the matrix of emotions, personality, and events that unfold in the workplace. Leaders who embrace and develop the skills for Emotional Intelligence have the ability to steer this complexity towards a positive and successful outcome.
Why this is important to us
At thoughtbot, we value human-centric work, and believe that the way we work can always be improved. We want to share what has worked well for us to inspire positive change in our world. We believe that Emotional Intelligence, along with other Diversity and Inclusion efforts, are key to inspiring a world with human-centered values.
Why does a culture of Emotional Intelligence matter?
How might we
thoughtbot is continuously establishing new strategies and techniques to develop our Emotional Intelligence values. We use these to develop our personal EQ, and are always working to uncover more.
How Might We Continuously Improve Our Emotional Intelligence?