Working With Emotional Intelligence Written Assignment

1. Goleman offers twelve questions to ask yourself to see if you work with emotional intelligence. If you answer "yes" to half or more, (and if other people who know you agree with your self-rating) then you are doing okay with your EI. See where you score on these items taken from his emotional intelligence chart. 

Do you - can you - are you:

• understand both your strengths and weaknesses?
• be depended on to take care of every detail? Do you hate to let things slide?
• comfortable with change and open to novel ideas?
• motivated by the satisfaction of meeting your own standards of excellence?

stay optimistic when things go wrong? 

• see things from another person's point of view and sense what matters most to that person?
• let customers' needs determine how you serve them?
• enjoy helping co-workers develop their skills?
• read office politics accurately?
• able to find "win-win" solutions in negotiations and conflicts?
• the kind of person other people want on a team? Do you enjoy collaborating with others?
• usually persuasive?

Add up the number of questions to which you could answer yes. How did you score? Answering yes to six or more of the EI skill items indicates that you are working well and with maturity in the workplace. Do you have more than five questions to which you answered no? Do people who know you well agree with your high number of negative scores? If so, what can you do to change and improve your emotional score?

2. In businesses and workplaces of every kind, a great deal of time has to be spent in meetings. To be effective and productive, these meetings must be carefully planned, skillfully led, and the emotional intelligence of the participants can affect the outcome. What are some things that you need to do as the moderator of the meeting to get all participants to share information and contribute to good decision-making? Remember that the key can be understanding others, political awareness of the emotional currents and power relationships, leveraging diversity, developing others and bolstering their abilities as suggested by Goleman.

3. Another area in which empathy has a play is being a good listener. If you know your emotional intelligence "quotient" needs improvement in your listening ability and that you need to improve your listening habits, what are some of the things you can do to become a "mature" EI listener? What distinguishes good listeners from the bad ones that you may know or have to deal with each day at work?

References

Goleman, D. (2006). Working with emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.

Mittal, V., & Sindhu, E. (2012). Emotional intelligence and leadership. Global Journal of Management and Business Research