Michael DeSafey | Executive Recruiter and HR Professional
EQ and the importance of Relationships for Career Advancement
When you want to find a better job, it’s often who you know instead of what you know that gets you there. One way to advance more rapidly in your profession is to increase your emotional intelligence, or EQ. This is the ability to correctly perceive your emotions and those of others. We want to help you find the next great position in your career pathway, and so we will explore the importance of relationships for career advancement in terms of EQ.
Building Your Soft Skills
Emotional intelligence is about building soft skills such as empathy, effective listening, compassion, sensitivity, and tolerance. It means controlling your emotions and using your perceptions to understand the emotions of others. You can build better relationships with everyone in your field by learning to communicate better. You can learn to listen to how you feel. You can share that information when appropriate and hold it back when the situation with another person doesn’t call for it.
How It Works
Increasing your EQ occurs on many levels. One way is to adapt your communication style to the messages you receive from others. For example, you wouldn’t use a loud voice or bring up a sensitive issue to an employee who just described having a terrible day. If you are the boss and you have to bring up something important, you would help the employee calm down before introducing any hot-button issues or criticism. Ideally, you would introduce any difficult subject matter on another day.
Get Started
There is a direct connection between one’s emotional intelligence and leadership. One study defined a transformational leader as someone who looks to find the motives in others and wants to satisfy their higher needs and engage them as full people. This is an important quality for leaders to have in the construction and engineering industries where teamwork is essential for timely project completion and for general safety on the job site. People want to work under transformational leaders who inspire them, and they will work harder each day for them. Transformational leaders with a high EQ are easier to understand the first time around, and they receive more messages the way that others intend them. They are more comfortable to be around on the job site.
Build stronger business relationships through sensitive communication if you take the time to use your EQ.
Michael DeSafey is a leading executive recruiter for professionals in the construction, engineering and environmental industries. He is currently the President of Webuild Staffing www.webuildstaffing.com . To learn more about Michael or to follow his Blog please visit www.michaeldesafey.com