Reflective Essay On Emotional Intelligence

As I reflect back on my first week of the residency session, one of the earliest learning (of many that I will attain over the next 17 months), was my naive knowledge on the concept of emotional intelligence. My definition of emotional intelligence prior to taking the class was one’s ability to understand and manage emotions in personal and professional life. To my surprise, I am not only made aware of the importance of managing emotions but also acknowledging the importance of perceiving, generating and understanding emotions in myself and people around me. All four facets of emotional intelligence are critical for success. Perceiving individual or team emotion as a leader is important to identify the problem and regulate the emotion as soon …show more content…
And for a group to be completely engaged, emotionally intelligent norms need to be established to foster positive behavior and attitudes. Even if one individual does not have the right mindset, it could derail the team energy and morale. This was evident to us in one of our group break out session where I as a leader with negative emotions was tasked to come up with a team name. With one members unpleasant feeling and high energy, the teams’ creativity was significantly reduced and furthermore, other team members also inherited this emotion. It is critical to be aware and cognizant of not only my emotion but also understanding emotions of my colleagues and coworkers to build on emotions in a constructive way. Based on these experiences last week and the knowledge gained, I will start my meetings with positive reinforcing thoughts to increase participation, and collaboration which will result in better decisions, more creativity and improved team …show more content…
The frictions got hotter as the tool lacked reliability and there was no clear diagnosis of the equipment issue from the service team. I setup a meeting to get both teams in the same room for alignment and to get the service team excited to understand the importance of their role to ensure synergy between the teams to deliver the best result for our customer. I started the meeting by explaining the purpose of the meeting, and communicating the criticality of this issue and its potential impact to our business. In this introduction, I didn’t read my audience well and went too far and deep with the introduction. One of the senior members from the service team with over 12 years of experience was annoyed by my detailed explanation. The meeting ran for about thirty minutes and to me, it seemed that everyone was aligned and we all left the room on a positive note. I completely missed perceiving emotions of the senior member on the service team. That afternoon, one of my engineers reluctantly stop by my desk and provided me some feedback that Carol was unhappy in the meeting. He went on to explain that her body language was pretty clear that she was offended and I questioned her experience and technical knowledge. Fortunate to me, my engineer