Managers who know themselves well and who are aware of their emotions are in a better position to understand and empathise when managing others.
So an important step to being an effective manager is self-awareness. This means, amongst other things, knowing:
Emotional Intelligence, or EI as it is known, can be helpful in this area of interpersonal understanding as it involves thinking about self and others.
EI is said to be categorised into five aspects:
1. SELF-AWARENESS
The more aware you are of yourself and ‘what makes you tick’, the more effective a communicator you will be and the better manager. Once you understand yourself and are open to self-development, you are in a better position to lead and guide others.
2. MANAGING EMOTIONS
Do you always know how you feel? For many of us our feelings are unclear and hidden as we have been taught to suppress emotions. Reversing this lesson is not easy, but research shows that unless we are first aware of our emotions we cannot gain control of them. You can increase your awareness of feelings by spending time thinking about them. The more you practise, the more conscious you will become.
3. MOTIVATING YOURSELF
Once you know what your emotions are, you can put them to good use to motivate yourself and keep yourself motivated regardless of the situation. You no longer have to react in an automatic way to outside stimuli; you can choose.
4. EMPATHY
Without empathy it is difficult to gain people’s trust, create rapport, influence people, develop their abilities.
What is empathy? Empathy is having a sensitivity to the feelings and concerns of others and seeing things from their point of view.
5. HANDLING RELATIONSHIPS
Once you have empathy with someone and can recognise their feelings of stress, anger, sadness, rejection and so on, you can manage emotions in others. Handling relationships means having a degree of social competence and using social skills.
Having the basic building blocks of EI means it is possible to control your emotions, create and maintain successful relationships, motivate self and others to achieve goals, all key aspects of management!
Feedback should be a two-way process. Now is your chance to ask for some for yourself! This takes courage but is worth it.
The more specific the feedback the more valuable it will be - this applies equally to praise as to criticism. You can help people be specific with their feedback by being specific with your questions:
Choose two or three people you trust in your organisation. They may be your staff, peers or manager. Identify two aspects of your management style that you want to receive feedback on. Be specific about what you ask for.
You need to be sure that if they are critical, you don’t get defensive though. You will have to handle your feelings about the interchange if some of the comments are negative!
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This Management Skills for New Managers course is aimed at recently appointed Managers. Using real world scenarios it covers the skills required to make the adjustment from working alongside your colleagues to managing and motivating them to work for you.
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