“People’s emotions are rarely put into words, far more often they are expressed through other cues.
The key to intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels, tone of voice, gesture, facial expression and the like” ― Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence.
Project Managers must have talent, knowledge and skills. With these qualities, Emotional Intelligence also plays a vital role. Emotional Intelligence is about understanding and managing owns and others emotions. This helps the leaders to run the project successfully.
Emotional Intelligence requires in every step of Project Management. Project Managers deal with People every day to make the project complete and successful.
During scope management, Emotional Intelligence helps a Project managers to perform brainstorming sessions, Negotiation, influencing and freezing the scope, to avoid scope creep.
When the project manager delegate assignments to the team, the Emotional Intelligence helps to understand which resource can perform which assignment as per their strengths. When the team struggles with time pressure to complete the task the Project manager uses the Emotional Intelligence to work out on the solutions to avoid the roadblocks.
This is the most obvious field where a project manager need to deal with the resources to make the job done. Within this process, PM uses Emotional Intelligence to resolve conflict, negotiate with the team, and building good working relationship. Emotional Intelligence also helps most when the team under goes Storming phase of Tuckman model.
It works well for stakeholder management and managing politics. It also helps in managing own/others expectation. When Project manager understands others emotions, that helps in providing appreciative feedback. Also by managing own emotions, Project managers welcomes feedback. Which keeps the team motivated and focused on a common goal. Builds a healthy and trustworthy environment.
A project Manager can improve the Emotional Intelligence, by doing the below practices.
- Taking training on managing success with positive attitude.
- Performing Yoga, exercise and good health
- Keep motivating and inspiring yourself and others
- Being focused
- Understanding your strength and others
- Socialism
- Empathy