You need not wait to find an opportunity to develop and leverage your emotional intelligence skills. Each moment affords you many such rich opportunities. Your next phone call, greeting in the hallway, team meeting, or thought about what’s coming next are all opportunities for growth. You will feel and think and decide in each of these situations, so why not try an emotionally intelligent approach to just one of them?
This is the time to ask yourself how you are feeling, how these feelings are guiding your thinking, why you are feeling this way, and how your feelings might change, and then harnessing the wisdom of these feelings as you think, decide, and act.
And what if the attempt is a failure? It is a failure not to make the attempt, which the emotionally intelligent manager recognizes. By stretching the boundaries of your understanding and actions, you are developing your emotional abilities. Building the emotionally intelligent manager happens piece-by-piece, situation-by-situation, and emotion-by-emotion. It happens by being smart about emotions and having emotions help you to be smarter.
The emotionally intelligent manager will also look for successes. With a myriad of opportunities to test out your newfound skills, you will also have successes, big or small. These must be recognized and celebrated, as the feelings of happiness, satisfaction, or joy will motivate you to continue when you experience obstacles and when successes do not come with ease.
This chapter underscores the most important message of this article: emotions provide data that assist us in making rational decisions and behaving in adaptive ways. To ignore this source of data is to neglect an important aspect of the information available to us. When engaging in the work of leaders and managers by building effective teams, planning and deciding effectively, motivating people, communicating a vision, promoting change, and creating effective interpersonal relations, we must rely on our emotions as a source of inspiration and feedback. The emotional system is an intelligent system; that’s why it evolved in animals, including humans. Our emotions point us in the right direction and motivate us to do what needs to be done. In that spirit, we close with the words of one of our favorite emotions theorists, someone who recognized the intelligence of the emotions decades ago, Sylvan Tomkins: “Out of the marriage of reason with affect there issues clarity with passion. Reason without affect would be impotent, affect without reason would be blind.”