Indra Nooyi is the Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo. She is well known for her leadership skills and is recognised as one of the Top 10 emotionally intelligent Fortune 500 CEOs. Nooyi believes in creating and nurturing strong professional relationships. She maintains a blog through which she addresses the employees of PepsiCo and posts every other week. She is known to write to the parents of her employees and thank them for raising great kids.
Given a choice would you like to be the smartest person in the office or the happiestIJ Now here is a well-known secret that is not widely prevalent — even the smartest person would rather be the happiest. The quality of our life lies to a large extent in our emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify, understand and manage our emotions in order to create balance, facilitate better communication and maintain healthy relationships. In other words, emotional intelligence impacts almost every interaction that we have and has an enormous impact on our self- identity and self-esteem.
What Makes a leaderIJ
If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far ~ Daniel Goleman In 1995 — in an article titled What Makes a leader — Daniel Goleman spoke about the five aspects of emotional intelligence or EI. Self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills made up the EI basket. let us look at each one of these briefly and see how they impact our lives.
The first and most crucial part of EI is self-awareness. We have to be aware of our own emotions, strengths and weaknesses. Self-awareness brings self-understanding and a clearer comprehension of our goals. Once we clearly know where we are heading, it becomes easier to plan the journey. Self-regulation refers to managing our emotions and not ‘losing it’. Often people lose control of a personal or professional situation simply because they lost their temper. When we regulate our emotions we gain control of the situation. We are also able to see options that may not have seemed possible when emotions clouded our judgement.
The next part of EI is the ability to motivate ourselves. This is vital as we are not dependent on external forces to encourage and motivate us. This allows one to set goals and pursue them passionately. If we look at the role models around us we usually discover that they are self-motivated, charged and driven. Empathy is a key part of EI. To be able to feel for others and understand their situation offers us deeper insights into their thinking and behaviour. This in turn helps us to become adept at treating people according to their emotional reactions.
The final aspect of EI is social skills or the manner in which we manage our relationships and build networks. People with high level of social skills are able to quickly find common ground and build rapport. While the first three components of EI - self-awareness, self-regulation and motivation - focus on our own understanding, the latter - empathy and social skills - focus on our relationship with others. Our EI is largely responsible for how we think, behave and live our lives. We should be aware of the value of EI and make efforts to improve our emotional intelligence quotients. This will help us to be happier and lead a more fulfilled everyday life.
(The writer is a social & corporate leader and former COO for the Uttarakhand Government 108 emergency services)