Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage one's emotions as well as emotions of people around you. The proponent of emotional intelligent Mr. Daniel Goleman brought about the five elements of emotional intelligent. The first element is self-awareness. This element requires one to know his feeling and how emotions and actions resulting from the feelings affect the people around him. Self-awareness is brought about by humbleness and realization of individual strengths and weaknesses. To foster self-awareness, you can keep a journal of your thoughts because your thoughts affect your emotions. Besides, you are required to take time before acting or responding to situations when you have strong emotions. This helps you to choose the best way to respond to a situation (Goleman 16).
In reference to this element, I know my strengths and weakness. For example, I know I don’t think straight when confronted with stressful situations. I get bitter, and I look for shortcuts to get out of the stressful. In many cases, the shortcuts put me in a more stressful situation. My strong trait is that is preparing in advance to avoid the situations. However, when confronted by a unique stressful situation I still embrace shortcuts. This trait of looking for the shortcut is very bad and can negatively affect my performance as a leader. However, the ability to prepare and avoid stressful situation will make me excel as a leader because I will prepare my team to beat deadlines in advance. Besides, I will prepare a decision making a tree to guide my action in recurring stressful situations.
The second element is self-regulation. To be self-regulated, you are required to have values guiding your actions. These values restrain you from verbally attacking or stereotyping other people. They also restrain you from making emotional decisions (Goleman 17). I have more strength in this element than the weakness. This is because I am a religious person and the Bible forms the basis of all what I do. It requires me to do to other people what is right and just. Besides, I should restrain acting when bitter. In a leadership position, I would excel because people can easily understand and evaluate my behavior. They can easily trust me because they know I will act righteously regardless of our relationship.
The third element is motivation. Leaders are required to be self-motivated in carrying out their duties to enable them to achieve the highest standards possible. To stay motivated it is essential to reexamine the reasons why you are doing your job. Besides, a leader should reexamine the causes of demotivation and come up with ways of dealing with them. To stay motivated, one is also required to be optimistic Goleman 21)(. Evaluating my strengths and weakness against this element I realize that I am intrinsically motivated in carrying out my duties and attaining high standards. I evaluate my objective in every activity and come up with a way of achieving the objectives. Staying by my plans keeps me optimistic that the results will be the best possible in the given situation. I rarely require anyone to remind me what I should do.
The fourth element is empathy. This requires a person to put themselves in the shoes of others especially when demand them to carry out a given task. It also requires one to: challenge team members not to act unfairly, listen to issues raised and respond constructively (Goleman 28). In evaluating my traits, I realize that am not an empathetic person because I like it when a team is working as per the plan. I rarely listen to people who are not working hard to achieve team’s objective. I always use the phrase; it should be done regardless of the hurdles anyone is facing. The only strength I have on this element, as a leader, is offering constructive feedback when a team member identifies his difficulties and shares them in advance.
The last element is social skills. An emotionally intelligent leader should be open to hearing good and bad results. Besides, the leader should be able to make the team support him in new projects. The leader works together with the team resolving disputes that occur in the course of the work and makes the team own the results of the work (Goleman 35). As a person, I am a team player, and I know that differences in personalities and ideas bring conflict in a group. Thus, I always hold open sessions with people I work and socialize with and allow them to freely discuss how others hinder their work and best way of achieving the desired results. Moreover, I encourage them to develop a code of conduct that dictates team’s behavior. This character of openness allows me to bring people to support my ideas, makes the team own the results and reduces friction among members of the team. However, my weak point is that I do not like revising the code of conduct quite often regardless of the changing situation. I fell that revising the standard behavior set encourages people to give excuses for dismal performance.
Five-year of work experience will help me become a very good manager. Thus, I can take the position. I will have learned the best way of motivating workers in the organization. Moreover, I will have developed a journal of recurring stressful situations in the organization and developed decision trees of dealing with them. My ability to plan, set objective and motivate people to own good and bad results achieved will encourage cohesion among the workers.
Work Cited
Goleman, Daniel . Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ . N.p.: n.p.,
2006. Print.
