MARCH 20209A person's mindset leads to innate emotions, experiences, thought-processes, and responses to situationsinterpersonal and intrapersonal capabilities. Togeth-er, these two are the biggest pecies of puzzles that, if put together in the right order, can make an individual emotionally intelligent.Emotional Intelligence is all about being truly aware of yourself -- your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Further, it involves knowing how exactly these collec-tively impact your behaviour and your performance at large. Once you know how situations impact you, you can use this information as a reference point to under-stand the actions and behaviour of others around you. Through such self-awareness, you can form trusted relationships at the workplace or even outside of it. Emotional Intelligence as a Key for Start-up SuccessTo be truly successful, an entrepreneur must learn how to manage relationships, both internal and ex-ternal. Through higher emotional intelligence, a leader can boost retention in terms of clients as well and employees. The failure of Roadstar.ai, an autonomous vehicle product startup, caused due to conflict between the co-founders despite a fundraising of $128 million in the initial year, and that of DaWanda due to lacking in-novation and risk management, speaks volumes about how failures can be averted if the management focuses on mental resilience and emotional intelligence. Business is stressful. There is no simpler way to put it. Therefore, start-up founders and team leaders must invest time and resources into the improvement of in-terpersonal skills. Along with these, leaders will also need to practice adaptability in order to thrive in the face of challenges. Flexibility of thoughts and actions is a skill that they must ace so that they can quickly change their approach in case of a challenging/prob-lematic situation and emerge victorious from the met-aphorical battle. It is only by harnessing these skills pertaining to emotional intelligence that business leaders can achieve a growth mindset. So, How do leaders Achieve this Mindset and Become Emotionally Intelligence? Leaders who lack interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence often display discrimination among em-ployees, lack of focus, lack of direction, inability to take responsibility, and an inability to set an example for their team. For such leaders, it is important to raise their emotional intelligence skills, the first step to-wards which is complete self-awareness. They need to identify their leadership gap and work towards bridg-ing this through communication and consideration. Apart from self-awareness, the skills that consti-tute emotional intelligence include being consistent in interaction and actions, forging trust, delivering constructive feedback, being authentic and genuine, empowering people, appreciating efforts, practicing active listening, defining healthy boundaries, and dis-cussing solutions instead of problems. While you may not be able to learn things over-night, permanent change will come gradually. Leaders will need to strike a balance between the emotion-al and rational parts of their brains even in times of stress. They will have to learn the skills on a deeper, emotional level-- experiencing and practicing them in their everyday life. They will have tobecome con-sciously aware of their default tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses and then, take conscious steps to im-prove the situation instead of avoiding confrontation. When it comes to Business, Change is the only Constant Here, we are talking about changing your mindset and approach. While an inflexible mindset will not be able to achieve much, a growth mindset will allow leaders to adapt in an uncertain business landscape and ap-proach challenges with renewed confidence without being averse to problematic situations. According to research by CBinsights, disharmo-ny between teams and their management is the top reason for failure after fund crunch or ceased market need, for most startups to fail. In order to avoid such a situation, achieving and displaying the highest levels of emotional intelligence should be at the top of the priority list for business leaders. This, coupled with complete honesty and transparency, will contribute to their continued success. Start-ups, then, will thrive and grow into flourishing enterprises that are not just successful, but also great places to work.
< Page 8 | Page 10 >