Imagine you recently had dinner with two friends who worked at different companies. You were each discussing your jobs, the projects you were working on and your bosses. One friend shared they had just joined a new team, and it was the first time in ages they felt motivated. They said it was so nice working for a leader where they felt they were supported, and it was clear what was expected of them.
Your other friend was quiet and when pressed about how things were at work, reluctantly admitted things were not going well. The leader of the team would get angry and fly off the handle for the slightest reason, wouldn’t listen or take feedback and didn’t seem to care at all about the well-being of the team — just getting results. Your friend admitted if the situation did not improve, they may be looking for another job. The two leaders described by your friends are, in essence, describing their leader’s differing levels of emotional intelligence.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence or emotional quotient (EQ) — according to Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist and author who made the phrase recognizable in the early 1990s — is the ability to identify, assess and control one’s own emotions, the emotions of others and that of groups. Or, said another way, the ability to understand and manage your emotions as well as recognize and influence the emotions of those around you.
According to Goleman, emotional intelligence is a set of personal skills that are learned and learnable. These skills are a combination of self-awareness, managing your emotions well and empathy — tuning into other people and putting it all together to have effective relationships. Emotional intelligence is broken into four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.
- Self-awareness: This is the ability to understand your affect on others. It’s knowing what you are feeling and understanding how it shapes your perceptions, thoughts and impulses to act.
- Self-management: This relates to the ability to control your impulses and avoid acting rashly. When you get upset or angry, you can manage your emotions to keep them from disrupting what you are currently focused on accomplishing.
- Social awareness: Empathy is the key here — trying to understand another’s point of view, not just listening to them. You understand what another person thinks and feels, and you care about them.
- Relationship management: This is defined by the ability to manage relationships and productively express your emotions — how you perceive emotions and interact and communicate with others. Can you handle conflicts well, keep yourself calm and listen to the other person? Are you demonstrating strong and effective communication skills?
Why Is It Important to You & Your Business?
Propane businesses, in their most simplistic definition, deliver propane and provide services to customers for a fee and hopefully for a profit. In most delivered fuels businesses, a great deal of time and money is spent on managing gross margins, increasing operational efficiencies, improving strategies and marketing, etc., to increase profitability. Other than price, what makes a potential customer want to do business with your company? What differentiates your company from every other company delivering fuel and providing service in your area? Do you ever consider it is the relationships you and your staff have built within your communities, the way your staff handles difficult situations or conflict, or the way your staff can connect with your customers and potential customers?
It’s the interpersonal skills and leadership of your staff that your customers notice. Bottom line: People do business with people, and they want to do business with people they like.
It seems that people have less patience and tend to become confrontational more easily. Consider all the encounters your drivers, service technicians, salespeople, customer service personnel, managers and you, personally, have with your customers and potential customers. Imagine if one of your employees was in a difficult situation with a customer and they had the interpersonal skills to better understand and manage their emotions while recognizing and influencing the emotions of the customer. This is the significance of how emotional intelligence can influence your business.
More commonly discussed are the impacts of emotional intelligence within organizations. Emotional intelligence is an interpersonal skill that distinguishes effective leaders. It is also a skill that, when absent, often results in workplace conflicts and misunderstandings, which arise from the person’s inability to recognize, comprehend and manage emotions. The old saying “one bad apple spoils the barrel” recognizes that individuals and especially leaders who have low emotional intelligence will benefit from help to develop the skills (or provide them the opportunity to work elsewhere) that could significantly improve your business.
Employees tend to leave bad leadership, not companies, just like employees tend to follow good leadership. When talking to business owners, one of their key challenges is finding good employees. We all understand the importance of hiring individuals with the technical skills needed for a position, but it’s their emotional intelligence that will help them be great employees and eventually move up within the company.
Where to Start?
The first step is becoming knowledgeable about emotional intelligence and sharing it with your staff. It should be treated like any other training performed in your business. One of the most stressful situations for your employees is dealing with difficult customers or difficult fellow employees. Most would welcome the opportunity to learn skills to better handle difficult situations. And it should start at the top.
The most exciting thing about this sought-after interpersonal skill is it can be learned or is learnable at any age and any level. Anyone can continue to develop this skill at any point in their lives if they are motivated. This is great news for you and your propane business!
