Richard L Daft defines emotional intelligence as “a person’s abilities to perceive, identify, understand, and successfully manage emotions in self and others.” It’s important for all good leaders to have strong emotional intelligence so that they know how people around them and even how they themselves think and act and why they do what they do. Daft divides emotional intelligence into 4 components: Self-Awareness, Social Awareness, Self-Management, and Relationship Management.

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I feel I have strengths in the self-awareness and relationship management. I could improve upon my social awareness and self-management.

• Self-Awareness: I’m very confident in both my public speaking skills as well as in my leadership abilities. I’m also very in touch with my emotions and understand how they work.
• Relationship Management: I am an excellent collaborator. I communicate with people very well and make sure everyone knows each other, gets along together, and is up to speed on what needs to be done. I recently worked on a proposal with a group for my BA 352 course at the University of Oregon and this is what one of my teammates had to say on the subject of my relationship management during the term (Under “Strengths”)

• Social Awareness: I’ve always had a problem with empathy. I rarely find myself “putting myself in other people’s shoes” and I’m working very hard to fix that. Over the course of this last term in BA 352, one of my goals was to become more empathetic by learning more about my team mates, and through that I learned that being empathetic comes naturally when you build a relationship with someone. I need to work more on getting to the point where I understand people well enough to be able to put myself into their shoes and be more empathetic.
• Self-Management: I understand my emotions well, I sometimes have trouble keeping harmful emotions in check. If I’m not passionate about something, it’s hard for me to be enthusiastic about working on a project. During the same proposal as shown above, I wasn’t overly passionate about it and my teammate puts this problem into words very well as seen here (Under “Areas For Improvement”) On the other hand I see myself as trustworthy, responsible, and adaptable.

Self reflection like this is something that quite honestly does not come natural to me. The only time I really engage in self reflection like this is when I’m prompted by someone to do it. I understand it’s a good habit to get into and since doing it weekly (see the weekly blog posts here) in BA 352, I’ve gotten better about doing it more often. In term of asking others for feedback, I don’t like to do it in a confrontational manner. If done bluntly and directly, it can come off as intimidating. Instead I prefer to ask for anonymous feedback so that it becomes less personal and becomes easier to correct bad habits and focus on good ones much easier. When given such feedback, I take it to heart. If you read an entire page of compliments to you and there’s one little criticism hidden in there, all you can think about for the rest of the day is that one little comment, and the same is true for feedback I receive. I reflect on it, ask myself how I will improve it, make a plan to work on improving it, and do my very best to do so. My group members this term told me that I was quick to shut down ideas in group meetings, so I made a plan to pay attention to every time I wanted to say “no” and instead of saying “no” I would ask “why”. This really opened up group discussion and helped me become a better leader and helped me become more empathetic as well by really getting insight as to why my teammates thought the way they did.