You’ve probably heard of intelligence quotient, or IQ. It’s a metric used to gauge how “smart” someone is. IQ may indicate skills like pattern recognition, book smarts, advanced logic, and comprehension, but it doesn’t indicate capacity for empathy, the ability to relate to others, or overall capacity for building successful relationships. That metric is a bit less defined, but no less important. It’s called “emotional intelligence,” or EQ, and ensuring your employees understand this concept is foundational to workplace and organizational productivity. EQ can affect how teams communicate, collaborate, and more.

How Do You Teach Emotional Intelligence?

It may sound like a daunting subject to train for—how do you teach someone foundational qualities of empathy, respect, and understanding? The good news is that it’s possible. It starts with encouraging individual exploration and embedding self-awareness.

Understanding our own core values, motivators, and personality traits can be a great way to work toward an understanding of the same in others. When employees know their emotional strengths, weaknesses, and preferences, they are better equipped to approach tough situations, problem solve constructively, and create positive relationships.

Personality assessments like Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, and Enneagram all provide helpful guidance on an individual personality level. HRDQ also offers many personality style assessments to help employees understand how they’re showing up at work and in life. When beginning to explore emotional intelligence webinars, consider implementing some form of foundational assessment to help get the ball rolling.

Making Emotional Intelligence Applicable

Self-awareness can feel esoteric and intangible if it’s not paired with real-world applications. As you cultivate self-awareness, you can also present real-world scenarios so employees understand their instinctive approach and then workshop how to work through them with emotional intelligence.

For instance, you need emotional intelligence in situations like

• Working on a team
• Solving a problem
• Navigating a tight deadline
• During a peer review season
• Confronting a colleague

After watching our content on emotional intelligence, think about how you can design scenarios that engage these tangible issues, and facilitate conversations with employees about how they approach situations with emotional intelligence.