How does Emotional Intelligence serve project managers while managing complex projects?

Project Managers have an extremely important job of ensuring the business runs smoothly and efficiently in predominantly stressful environments. They are skilled and talented at leading the process, but often struggle to effectively lead the people—and that includes themselves. When leading without Emotional Intelligence, the typical obstacles of having decision making challenges, repetitive requests being met with incomplete or no response at all, lack of engagement and more ends up increasing stress and conflict to critical levels where project managers begin to experience deterioration in health, fulfillment and mental sanity.

Understanding how to leverage the skills of Emotional Intelligence helps project managers maintain relevance by enhancing self-awareness in communication styles, energy levels, triggers and most importantly, people skills. They are able to stretch their personality, request additional support, and/or facilitate difficult conversations. But this doesn’t happen overnight, and it is not something that can be done by yourself. A very smart scientist at NASA, led a highly emotional and difficult project without Emotional Intelligence and it caused him to suffer to the point that no one would look him in the eye. Later, in a management course, he learned there was a better way to lead and to gain consensus rather than approaching it with data and logic alone.