If you don’t master your emotions, they will run your life, team, and business. Having emotional intelligence, also called EQ, means you are aware and in control of how you express your feelings and understand the emotions of others. If you feel like you have a good grasp of your emotions or are already successfully working with a real estate team or as a recruiter, you may think, “Why should I care about my EQ?”
High emotional intelligence is a trademark of trailblazing leaders, but there’s a catch – all roads to a high EQ include hard lessons. However, the benefits of sharpening your emotional awareness are huge, personally and professionally. The journey is a rewarding, life-changing process that makes you someone worthy of following.
How emotional intelligence impacts your leadership
What does it look like when a leader isn’t in touch with their EQ? Whether you are just starting your career or have many decades of leading real estate teams, we can all come up with examples where a lack of emotional intelligence caused conflict.
Picture the following scenarios:
- You form a meaningful relationship with a new hire but then notice they’re not meeting expectations. You feel conflicted about addressing the issue, and fear hurting their confidence or losing them. Instead of addressing the problem, you say nothing and resent them for their subpar performance.
- A driven, qualified candidate you were quick to hire blows you away. They quickly gain career success. You love their work ethic, but as the days progress, they clearly lack collaboration skills. By not being a team player, your harmonious workplace culture breaks down.
- You feel like you know yourself and how to succeed in building business relationships. Then, an offhand comment or body language triggers fear, anger, or sadness. Your emotional response is to take it out on them or yourself.
Do any of those challenging situations sound familiar? Problems like this cause additional stress, hurting your company culture, professional relationships, and personal life. If any of these situations ring true, don’t shield yourself from growth moments – use those insights to learn more about yourself. Not only will you better regulate your emotions personally, but developing your emotional intelligence will help you, as a leader, build better relationships, reduce stress, defuse conflicts, and increase job satisfaction.
How do you become more emotionally intelligent?
Take developing your EQ seriously by absorbing books and podcasts about emotional growth. Hire a coach and tell them you want to grow your emotional intelligence skills. Be selective about which thought leaders you trust so you can become the type of leader you’d follow.
As you work through this process, dig into essential topics like:
- Where and how you learned your perspectives and judgments
- What triggers your most significant emotionally charged actions
- Your leadership style and how your feelings play into it
- Core experiences and relationships from your childhood and adolescence
- What you learned and should unlearn from negative experiences
Reflecting and unpacking your blindspots improves your understanding of yourself and how you respond in personal relationships and stressful situations.
Building relationships and emotional intelligence in the workplace
It’s easier to show up as more of a leader and build a cohesive team when you have more awareness about yourself. To begin, put these practices into action:
- Be direct, even if it hurts
- Understand that genuine, honest conversations aren’t always comfortable
- Encourage openness and vulnerability
- Show your team how to interpret negative feedback with a positive outlook
- Use active listening
A strong team understands each other. Use your growing EQ to get a clearer picture of what each team member needs and wants from you. Double the impact by intentionally modeling the importance and value of growing personally so you can grow professionally.
To raise your emotional intelligence, enroll in the Emotional Intelligence Series on Ben Kinney’s Win Make Give.
The role of emotional intelligence plays in real estate recruiting
Emotionally self-aware recruiters find more success recruiting as they understand self-expression and intentional communication. With that in mind, you can attract and retain gifted real estate agents organically.
What do emotionally intelligent recruiters do differently in the candidate selection process?
- Do:
- Dive into who the candidate is outside of work, their communication style, and what they want from their career
- Accept you have no control over their words and reactions
- Ask questions about more than the essential skills
- Don’t:
- Prioritize only finding personal connections with candidates
- Take candidate interactions personally
- Make it your responsibility to put the candidate at ease
You can do more than fill a role — you can find an emotionally intelligent candidate with strong communication skills who is perfect for the job.
Why emotional intelligence is an asset in the recruitment process
When you understand yourself and become emotionally neutral, you can see someone more clearly and listen more closely. Unfortunately, many recruiters show up during the hiring process in a way that makes candidates feel like a number. High performers don’t want to be treated that way; they’ll find a place that sees their value.
Create a conversational space that appeals to authentic, high-potential candidates. During the interview stage, make them feel seen and heard. Show them that their growth as a person is just as important as their growth as an agent on your real estate team. When you intentionally use emotional intelligence to grow your business, you’ll find that more agents will be drawn to you and want to build future success together.
Using emotional intelligence to pick the right business partner
Expanding your business can be as challenging as growing your EQ. We found that real estate team leaders who prioritize emotional intelligence seek partnerships, like many of our agents at PLACE. Here are the top traits they embody:
- Value growth, self-awareness, and leadership
- Respect partners’ and team members’ autonomy
- Offers support when their partners express a need
- Make time to have honest, vulnerable conversations with each other
With the right business partner and leverage, you can have more resources to grow your business, team, and self without sacrificing talent retention.
How do PLACE partners improve their EQ?
Top teams powered by PLACE are plugged into a support system built from the ground up with people-centered values, beliefs, and culture. Fill out this form to discover how PLACE helps its partners increase their emotional intelligence.