Emotional Intelligence and the Project Managers - Part 3/3

Social Awareness

The next key part of emotional intelligence is building strong relationships with other people, and that requires social. It’s made up of four parts: 

1.      Empathy,

2.      Organizational awareness,

3.      Seeing others clearly, and

4.      Setting emotional boundaries

Empathy, the first component, refers to your ability to understand how other people feel. You’re able to recognize another person’s emotions – whether positive or negative – and engage accordingly. As a project manager, that means you need to listen to your team members using empathetic listening. Don’t just listen to their words alone; try to figure out what they’re really feeling.

You also must master the ability to see others clearly. That means understanding people and accurately assessing their strengths and weaknesses. It’s more challenging than it seems. Even if you don’t like the person, strive to think objectively; otherwise, you might impose your own bias. Take the time to really look and think.

Organizational awareness is closely linked with seeing others clearly. Organizational awareness is the ability to understand the emotional context of your organization, project team or other organization. What’s the power structure? Which emotions does it generate?

The last step is setting emotional boundaries that protect you from the emotions of others. It’s important to relate to other people’s emotions, but you shouldn’t allow them to control you.

Altering your language is a good way to help with this. When you’re angry with someone, for example, say you feel angry, not that they made you angry. Taking responsibility for your feelings is always better than blaming them on someone else.

Relationship Management

Project managers must build relationships more often and more quickly than most people do. That’s why relationship management is crucial! Relationship management has two key components: establishing stakeholder relationships and developing others.

There are four steps to establishing strong stakeholder relationships:

First, identify the project stakeholders, anyone who affects or is affected by the project: the team members, vendors, sponsors and so on. Next, gather as much information as you can about them. What role does each stakeholder play? What are their goals and interests? How do they communicate?

Subsequently, develop relationship strategies for them. Figure out what your most effective relationship with them would be and start working towards it.

Finally, keep managing the relationship – it’s an ongoing process. Check regularly that things are going well and your relationships are producing the results you want. You might do this by establishing regular meetings to check up on how everyone feels.

The second part of relationship management is developing your team members. That means acknowledging and commending their strengths, mentoring them and providing them with useful feedback. Developing others is ultimately a form of investing in the project team. So, first off, acknowledge their strengths: make them aware of their potential and always say “thank you” when they contribute to the project.

Next, give them targeted feedback. Targeted feedback is clear, objective and aimed at helping the person improve, not at putting them down. So don’t emphasize someone’s laziness; instead, focus on where they could improve. It’s better to talk about what could make someone’s performance better, as opposed to what made it bad. 

Finally, never stop mentoring and coaching your team members. Offer advice and encouragement whenever you can. Make sure they feel that they can always talk to you and that you’ll listen to what they have to say.

Emotional Intelligence and Team Leadership

The final aspect of emotional intelligence for project managers is team leadership. Team leadership is the ability to lead the project team toward their goals in a healthy and effective way. It’s how you overcome conflicts and keep everyone on track.

Communication and conflict management are the two most important skills here. Positive communication allows you to set the right emotional tone in all exchanges. It’s a big part of your job as a project manager, whether you’re communicating with stakeholders, team members, in an interview or over lunch. Project managers must communicate in a way that creates the right emotional atmosphere and avoids any feelings of negativity.

Emotional intelligence will also help you manage any conflicts that arise. That’s where skills like compromising come in. Compromising means solving the problem by openly discussing it and getting both sides to give up some of their demands.

You need to be self-aware and manage your own emotions in order to hold a truly open discussion; if you’re not, your emotions might take over. You also need to listen empathetically and communicate carefully with everyone involved. Compromising requires a lot of emotional intelligence!

Summing it up

Our emotions are important as they serve as indispensable sources of orientation and push us to act in a certain way. However, they can also make us act irrationally. That is why we need emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is a set of skills that enable you to recognize and manage emotions – both your own feelings and those of other people. Emotional intelligence is perhaps the most important factor in helping us lead fulfilled lives. Compared to IQ, it is a better predictor of academic success, job performance, and life success. And, unlike IQ, we can increase our emotional intelligence throughout life.

Though Emotional intelligence is important for everyone, it’s especially important for project managers. The project manager's job rests on human communication and solid connections with others. To be successful as a project manager, work on your self-awareness, manage yourself and your different relationships and listen empathetically to your team and stakeholders. Emotional intelligence doesn’t just make the workplace more pleasant; it gives you a competitive edge and helps you work toward your goals!