Emotions often lead to decision-making. Being Emotionally Intelligent allows you to have control over your emotions, which reduce impulsive and spontaneous decisions. Whether you are a CEO or a janitor you are constantly interacting with others, co-workers, suppliers, or customers.

Therefore, social skills play a significant role in business. If you improve how you interact with employees, managers, customers, and suppliers, your business will improve. One way of improving interactions with others is through improving your emotional intelligence. Emotional awareness plays a significant role in emotional intelligence and can be used to resolve problems.

Developing Emotional Awareness

Being aware of your own emotions is crucial. It also allows you to progress to being able to manage your emotions and apply emotional awareness to problem solving. Developing this will allow you to better understand your customers, suppliers, employees and managers, therefore, building a better relationship with them.
Have any of your past meetings not went as well as you’d hoped? Do you know why they didn’t go well? Was it due to your emotions? How were you feeling? Learning to be aware of your own emotions and identifying them correctly can lead you to be in a calmer state of mind. Raising your voice at a supplier meeting can ruin your business relationship and could give you and your business a bad reputation. Controlling your emotions all the time is difficult; however, this is a process that can be improved, but it needs to start with developing personal emotional awareness.

You also need to develop a strong awareness of others’ emotions to understand how to effectively communicate with them. This is a necessary starting point to manage emotions of others, which is a vital skill for any manager.

While self-reflection is a vital skill, think about how the other party involved. How did they feel? Were the feelings involved so strong that it swayed the outcome of the meeting? Was the objective of the meeting met? Understanding how they felt allows you to try and resolve the issue instead of burying what happened.
Being aware of your customers’ emotions is crucial when marketing your product or service. If you can make someone feel something, that’s half the battle. Customers who have an emotional connection with a brand are far more likely to stick around. In advertising, emotions are powerful. If you can incite an emotion in someone, the greater the impact of the advert will be, leading to greater brand recall. After all, we all want to be remembered.

Applying emotional awareness to problem solving

The main problem that emotional intelligence can solve is conflict. This could be useful as a manager attempting to solve an issue between two employees will find this process significantly easier when he/she understands the feelings on both sides.

Understanding emotions significantly increases the ease in solving problems. For example, if an employee is becoming passive aggressive or begins using sarcastic responses to your questions, then they may feel they are overlooked and undervalued or perhaps there is something else bothering them. Using emotional intelligence can make solving issues such as these significantly less stressful and time consuming. It can also reduce long-term damage to the company.

This is crucial with advertising. Presenting your company in a way that is appropriate for the target market is important but that doesn’t mean that other groups of people shouldn’t be considered in the process. For example, using provocative imagery of women in advertising campaigns has increasingly become a point of issue, with media outlets focusing on tearing down the companies behind those adverts. Once your reputation is tarnished by something like this, it is difficult to recover. One such case is American Apparel, who had to fire its founder, Dov Charney, to be able to restore its reputation. Understanding the emotions that adverts have on the consumer from a diverse range of people groups can reduce the likelihood of developing a bad reputation and precautions can be made by understanding the emotions involved. Therefore, solving the problem before it arises.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, emotional intelligence should be balanced by intellectual intelligence and should be increased or decreased depending on the industry. In accounting for example, intellectual intelligence would be more dominant due to the fact-driven nature of this sector, whereas marketing would rely more on emotional intelligence due to the people based nature of this sector.

The main take away from this blog is to consider the emotions of customers, colleagues and suppliers when interacting with them and to understand that the actions you take can have immediate or long-term effect on them. Thinking about their emotions before acting will lead to a better outcome, as you will not have them coming down on you if something goes wrong. Considering these groups will lead to improvements in long-term business partnerships.