8 Elements of Emotional Intelligence That Make People Want to Work With You

How’s your emotional intelligence doing in practice?

Are you working on it?

Do you know your emotions? Can you keep them in check?

Can you tell what your teammates are feeling? 

90% of successful people have high emotional intelligence. Most of them moved into management fast and now lead teams of every size, from a handful of people to large, sprawling organizations.

Emotional intelligence matters a lot at work, because a good leader feels with their people and understands them. That builds trust, and trust is priceless when you’re building a high-performing organization.

Reading your own emotions correctly and understanding other people’s situations and behavior matters even more when you lead a distributed team. It’s harder to put yourself in the shoes of people you don’t see every day, and whose daily problems you never run into yourself.

But a leader’s emotional intelligence isn’t only about how you show up at work. It’s closely tied to how you approach empathy, understanding and personal growth in your private life too.

Let’s start with the basics.

What you’ll learn	In short
What is emotional intelligence in business?	The ability to recognize and manage emotions, your own and your teammates’, in a way that shapes decisions and relationships in the team.
What are the elements of a leader’s emotional intelligence?	8 elements: self-awareness, self-control, self-esteem, motivation, stress resilience, empathy, assertiveness and influence.
Can emotional intelligence be learned?	Yes. A manager’s emotional intelligence is a skill you build through daily practice, not a trait you’re born with.
Where do you start?	With self-awareness: recognizing your own emotions and where they come from before you react to them.
What does high emotional intelligence give a leader?	The team’s trust, better decisions and higher performance, especially in a remote or distributed team.

What emotional intelligence means in practice for a CEO or senior manager

Emotional intelligence in business is the ability to recognize and manage emotions, your own and your teammates’, so that they lead to sound decisions and strong relationships in the team.

The world first heard about emotional intelligence only in 1990, thanks to two psychologists. The theory was created by Peter Salovey and John Mayer. But its most devoted champion, the person who did the most to popularize it, was Daniel Goleman.

He defines it as:

“the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.”

Under this definition, emotional intelligence is made up of 4 elements:

• recognizing your own emotions;
• managing and controlling emotions;
• understanding and acknowledging other people’s emotions;
• building relationships with others.

Together they let a leader build three groups of competencies:

• psychological competencies: the ability to build a healthy relationship with yourself, understand your own emotions and needs, and control and adjust them. They are self-awareness, self-control and self-esteem;
• action-oriented (praxeological) competencies: how you respond to situations, challenges and obstacles. They include motivation and handling stress; 
• social competencies: building relationships deliberately, for example by understanding other people’s emotions and behavior. From your teammates’ point of view, these are a leader’s most important competencies. They include empathy, assertiveness, and the ability to shape other people’s behavior and decisions by making a convincing case for your views, actions and goals.  

These are what we’ll cover today. 

We’ll show you why emotional intelligence in business matters so much, and how to learn it. 

Can you learn emotional intelligence? Yes!

Emotional intelligence isn’t something you’re born with.

You can build a leader’s emotional intelligence yourself.

That’s good news, given that, according to research, as many as 27% of Poles struggle to recognize emotions correctly.

Don’t be one of them, and you’ll set up both yourself and your whole team for success. 

We’ll start our look at the 8 elements of emotional intelligence in practice with… you.

Self-awareness: why a leader needs to know what they feel

Remember this:

Emotions are neither good nor bad.

They’re simply valuable information about you. 

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand them correctly. It’s also the will to keep looking for where they come from.

So that they don’t take control of you. 

What does that look like in practice?

In practice, a manager’s emotional intelligence shows in this: before they react, they look at what they’re feeling. A good remote team leader tracks their emotional states, looks for the causes, and then separates them from what they do. Decisions get made after the emotions settle. Only then are they sound and rational.

That’s where self-awareness should take you.

Building emotional intelligence in practice starts here. Before you move on to managing and controlling your emotions skillfully, you first need to work on understanding them, both in life in general and in the specific situations your distributed team runs into.

If you can’t do that, your emotions run you. Anger shows up and starts calling the shots. You hear it in your tone of voice, see it in your body language and the words you choose, and later it turns into mental and physical health problems.

How do you practice recognizing your own emotional states?

There’s only one way to get better at recognizing your emotional states: daily practice.

The best practice ground is a situation that triggers strong emotions.

• Are you angry with someone on your team?
• Are you bursting with excitement about a new contract?
• Are you anxious because a deadline is bearing down like an iceberg on the Titanic?

These are perfect moments to stop and reflect. Sit down and think about what’s behind the emotion and what the right response to the situation would be.

Above all, calm down.

Remember:

“You can’t always control what happens around you, but you can always control how you respond to it.”

In everyday life, meditation is great training for mindfulness. We’re big fans ourselves, because a moment of silence and some breathwork let you get to the bottom of your emotions, understand what’s really behind them, and then look for the right solutions.

Remember, too, that building emotional intelligence in practice is a process, and you have to earn the results. 

So practice mindfulness every day. Not just at work, but at home too, during ordinary chores and everyday situations. You’ll come to understand your own emotions faster. 

And that leads to the next key element… being able to control them.

Self-control: knowing that feelings can be steered in the right direction

Find your inner balance. 

Balance is the key to self-control. Once you’re aware of your emotions and their impact, the next step is learning how to balance them.

Controlling your feelings doesn’t mean suppressing them. 

It means steering them in the right direction. 

Watch out for strong emotions

We don’t just mean the more destructive feelings like anger and stress, but also the ones most people consider desirable: euphoria, excessive joy, excitement. All of them are a fast track to burnout, and as a team leader that’s something you can’t afford. 

Contrary to popular belief, burnout doesn’t only hit people under constant stress. It also hits people who pour every ounce of their energy… and feelings into their work. Strong emotional states eventually fade.

Emptiness is what’s left.

And emptiness is at the heart of burnout. 

Calm down, it’s worth it

Acting under strong emotions doesn’t always go hand in hand with good decisions. Feelings can distort your picture of reality and rob you of the ability to think rationally.

Meanwhile, as a remote team leader, you have to guide your teammates. They need to know, and feel, that the person steering their success can assess a situation fairly, without emotions getting in the way. 

That gives them a sense of stability and certainty. 

People would rather work with a leader like that. 

That’s why self-control is such an important part of emotional intelligence in business.

Self-esteem: a leader who trusts themselves earns the trust of others

Self-esteem is a part of a leader’s emotional intelligence without which you simply can’t lead a team well.

Nathaniel Branden argues that self-esteem is the match between a person’s ideals, judgments, standards and beliefs and how they actually behave.

It’s confidence in your own ideals and in the decisions you make, and that confidence is what lets you take on challenges.

How does self-esteem help you lead?

Trusting yourself lets you set goals, both for yourself and for your whole team. Believing those goals are right, in turn, takes away the urge to run from conflict and makes it easier to have a constructive discussion with the people who report to you and with the people above you. 

What’s more, self-esteem is what lets you admit mistakes, bad decisions or a wrong read of a situation. A leader with healthy self-esteem knows that everyone is allowed to stumble, themselves and their teammates included. 

And that’s an important step toward building your social competencies, the ones your teammates value most. 

But before we get to those, let’s spend a little more time on you. 

We’ll look at a leader’s emotional intelligence through the lens of action-oriented competencies and how they affect you and your team. 

We’ll start with what drives you.

Motivation: believe in what you do, or let others call the shots

Emotional intelligence in management makes it easier to set goals, adjust them, and drop them when new opportunities show up on the horizon. Strong motivation is what makes all of that possible.

Motivation is the skill that lets you, as a leader, point your actions in the direction you’ve chosen. It’s also what lets you commit fully and stay focused on the road you’ve picked and each stage along it.

It also lets you move beyond micromanagement to macromanagement, which is the foundation of managing a remote team and of building more trust and engagement in it.

Motivation is what keeps you from ever losing sight of your goal.

A motivated leader motivates others

Believing the goal makes sense lets you explain it clearly to others and keep the end vision alive. When a team never sees each other in person, that kind of clarity about what you’re doing and where you’re heading is the foundation of its performance.

Your motivation, together with the charisma people expect from you, will help you convince them the goal is right. That understanding turns into more engagement, and with it, better performance across the whole team and organization.  

Of course, motivating people is easy when you’re on a winning streak. 

It’s harder when things don’t go your way and problems pile up like garbage on the streets of Naples. 

That’s where emotional intelligence in practice comes to the rescue again.

Keep calm

Every business is a competition. The drive to succeed and the motivation to hit your goals create setbacks and frustrating situations. How you behave in them defines you as a leader.

Stress resilience as an element of emotional intelligence in practice isn’t some literary invention. It’s an important skill that helps you not just survive as a manager, but lead your team to its goal despite the obstacles. 

Remember that in tense situations, your teammates will be counting on you. 

Stress resilience isn’t only about handling negative events and tense situations well yourself. It’s also about easing bad moods in your people, calming their emotions and defusing tension. 

Your calm should rub off on everyone. 

Only a balanced team that works with a sense of stability performs efficiently and effectively. There are fewer wrong decisions, and work moves faster and hits the mark more often. All thanks to your emotional intelligence as a leader and your stress resilience.  

Now let’s move on to the social side. 

Your relationships with your teammates come first, and they should also be what you build your emotional intelligence in practice toward.  

We’ll start with understanding.

Do other people’s emotions really matter?

Feeling with others and understanding their situation is a basic skill, but also an incredibly complex one, and we never stop learning it.  

The more relationships you have with people, the more chances you get to build your ability to understand them. 

The biggest problem comes when you don’t know how to read someone’s emotional state, and they either don’t know where it comes from themselves or are afraid to admit it. 

You’ll certainly recognize one of the six basic emotions in other people:

• anger
• fear
• sadness
• surprise
• excitement
• happiness 

The subtler ones are harder to read, for example: 

• anxiety 
• uncertainty
• satisfaction
• disappointment
• inner resistance 

Really understanding people’s emotional states takes time, practice and wisdom, and also… knowing the person. Not just their character, but their family and work situation and their cultural background, all of which strongly shape your teammates’ behavior, attitudes and even the decisions they make. That’s especially demanding in a remote team, where you can’t meet in person and building relationships is harder.

Emotional intelligence in practice will help you get to know each person step by step, and then show understanding for them and for the situations they’re dealing with. 

You can learn empathy. 

Practice it every day.

Watch, analyze and try out different responses. Over time, you’ll get very good at it.

Next on our list of emotional intelligence in practice: building your own position in the team, and being able to say “NO.”

Say “NO” to your own bosses too

Assertiveness is the ability to express your opinions, thoughts and views while respecting other people’s. It’s also the hard art of saying “no” when you disagree with the person you’re talking to.

And don’t save assertiveness for your teammates. It’s harder to push back on the people you report to. But when you stand your ground, you earn more respect.

So say “NO” when you’re absolutely sure you’re right.

Assertiveness follows directly from self-awareness, self-esteem and motivation, the traits of a good leader with fully developed emotional intelligence in practice.

But that’s only a slice of what the term covers.

Respect people for their criticism

Assertiveness is also about how you take praise and, much harder, criticism.

That last part matters most for building relationships in a remote team. As a leader, you have to criticize, and negative (if constructive) feedback is part of everyday life. For your teammates to handle it well and treat it as a chance to grow, you need to show them the way. 

Your emotional intelligence in business gives you what it takes.

But, like all the other elements, you have to work on it. 

What helps?

• Encourage your teammates to give you constructive criticism of your actions in 1:1s. It closes the distance and gives the people who report to you more courage.
• Don’t react defensively. Be ready for negative opinions, so you can approach them rationally and objectively. 
• Work on your self-esteem, which is the foundation of assertiveness.  

Remember that an assertive leader who practices what they preach comes across as credible and worthy of respect. That’s a strong foundation for a healthy relationship between you and each teammate.  

That brings us to the last, but by no means least, element of a leader’s emotional intelligence. 

Influence with good intentions

The ability to shape other people’s behavior and decisions, the last of the 8 elements of emotional intelligence, is closely linked to motivation and self-esteem. People with clear goals and confidence in their own views and opinions usually bring so much drive and energy to reaching them that it easily rubs off on others.

This skill is the foundation of high-performing teams.

Put your heart into your work.

Show your commitment.

Talk about your shared goals with belief and conviction.

It’s contagious.

And people who understand the organization’s goals and buy into its vision, and yours, will work with more commitment. There’s a reason people say that wanting it is half the battle.

In our view, wanting it is a lot more than half.

So if you want to be a genuinely good manager people actually want to work with, develop your emotional intelligence. You’ll reach your full potential, not just as a leader, but as a person and a member of society.

Emotional intelligence is also the foundation of a leader’s readiness to change the team’s work culture. Before your team changes its habits, you need to be able to name the emotions that change stirs up and guide people through them. In the Reliability Protocol, we work on this in Stage 7, Work Conventions, where we sit down with the leader and define the team’s new rules of collaboration.

Want to see how ready you and your team are for that kind of change? Take the Reliability Diagnostic. It takes a few minutes, and you’ll see where to start.

Frequently asked questions

What is emotional intelligence in business?

Emotional intelligence in business is the ability to recognize and manage emotions, your own and your teammates’, so that they lead to sound decisions and good relationships in the team. The concept was popularized by Daniel Goleman, and it was created by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer.

What are the elements and components of emotional intelligence?

According to Goleman, emotional intelligence has four components: recognizing your own emotions, managing them, understanding other people’s emotions, and building relationships. In a leader’s practice, they grow into 8 elements: self-awareness, self-control, self-esteem, motivation, stress resilience, empathy, assertiveness and influence.

Why does a manager’s emotional intelligence matter?

A manager’s emotional intelligence builds the team’s trust and lets you make decisions without uncontrolled emotions getting in the way. A team that can feel its leader’s stability works better and more willingly, especially when working remotely.

Can emotional intelligence be learned?

Yes. Emotional intelligence isn’t an inborn trait, you can build it. You develop it through daily practice: examining your own emotions, training mindfulness (for example, through meditation), and paying deliberate attention to how other people react.

What does emotional intelligence give you at work?

At work, emotional intelligence gives a leader better decisions, a lower risk of burnout and better relationships with teammates. For the team, it creates a sense of stability that feeds directly into performance.

What is emotional self-control?

Emotional self-control is the ability to steer your emotions in the right direction, not suppress them. It lets a leader stay balanced and make rational decisions, even under pressure.

What does emotional intelligence look like when you manage a remote team?

Emotional intelligence in managing a remote team means reading the emotions of people you don’t see every day and building trust across the distance. It takes more empathy and more deliberate communication than working in a single office.