Why EQ Matters

· Emotional Quotient,Business Leadership,Business Owner,Profit,Top Percent

Emotional Quotient.

If you’ve been following me for the last year or so, you’ll know that I’ve become more and more obsessed with it. Last year I kept hearing about how important it was for everything from productivity to profit. Being the ever skeptical Stephanie, I started my own research and experiments. After more than a year of implementation, I am firmly convinced that your EQ level does impact everything from your employees to your business to your own personal happiness!

  • The Top 1%

The first turn-on I had to the power of Emotional Intelligence was reading a sales book that indicated that the top 1% of all professionals were differentiated from the rest by their EQ levels. That same book suggested I read a book called Emotional Quotient by Daniel Goleman.

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It’s in this book that Goleman relays the study that found that the top 10% of professionals had a marked increase in IQ, but the difference between the top 10-2% and the top 1%, was their EQ level.

Being the top tier salesperson in the US can mean the difference between making $50k/year and making millions. That realization was all I needed to push myself to prioritize learning everything I could about EQ, and particularly how to increase it!

  • The Net Profit

Not more than a month later I attended a bootcamp on getting the most out of the assessments my company uses, and was pleasantly surprised that they spend the last day of the bootcamp talking about the EQ Assessments they offer. They discussed the results of a study directly linking the EQ of the leadership to the net profit of an organization through employee and customer turnover and engagement.

Through the culture of a business, leaders with a higher EQ impacted their employees’ EQ and gave them the ability to perform at their full potential: at a higher level of productivity & happiness. The employees’ EQ impacted their efficiency and how well they were able to work, which impacted how happy the customers were, which impacted whether or not those customers became happy repeat customers or took off running for the hills. Which in turn, impacted the Net Profit of the company since happy customers = net profit.

  • The Definition

Clearly EQ matters. It creates an incredible difference in the people in your organization. Fortunately for us, unlike IQ, EQ is not static and the best way to understand how to improve EQ is to understand what it is.

It appears that every expert has a different definition of EQ, so let’s keep this simple. Emotional Intelligence is comprised of five things: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, social regulation, and motivation.

Self-awareness: How well you are aware of your own emotions, your own feelings and what you're going through. It’s when you’re able to recognize that maybe you’re not at your peak right now and getting on an employee for making a mistake should wait until tomorrow when you’re feeling a little bit better and can gauge better whether or not that mistake was actually worth yelling about or getting mad about. It is all about being able to recognize where you are currently at with your emotions.

Self-regulation: Is your ability to take that self-awareness and be able to influence your own state of being. It’s being able to recognize when you’re sick and figuring out how it’s impacting your ability to perform at your peak and then adjusting to put yourself back as close to peak as possible. It’s being able to recognize when you’re stressed or not performing naturally at your best, and knowing what to do to adjust yourself.

Social awareness: Being able to recognize how the people around you are feeling. Being able to recognize not just if they are overwhelmed, but being able to tell if it’s just work, or if there’s something else going on. Being able to recognize if someone is upset with you, or upset at another situation. Being able to recognize if your trainee is picking up what you’re putting out, or pretending to in order to not look stupid.

Social regulation: Similar to self-regulation, this builds on Social Awareness. Once you are able to understand the energy going through your team, it’s important to be able to influence that energy. To be able to calm someone down, or excite and inspire them, to help them recognize their own emotional level and adjust it as well! Social Regulation is about helping your team to get back to a better place from any negative spot, so that they can focus better and be more excited about what they are doing.

Motivation: Is the last piece of EQ. This one is the tie that binds. If you're not motivated to make an impact that's bigger than yourself, it doesn't matter how high your self-awareness is, your self-regulation, your social awareness, or social regulation is. None of that matters because you won't do anything with it. Motivation is all about getting yourself to actually do something with the different parts of EQ.

As a blanket statement, you could say that your EQ is your ability to regulate the emotions of yourself and others. And that is a powerful tool in sales, in leadership and in life!