5 Simple Habits for High Emotional Intelligence, According to a Harvard Psychology Professor

If you ever find yourself trapped on an island and a genie offers you a way out, but only if you can name a 2-word leadership topic that has consumed the business world for the past three decades or so, I’ve got the answer for you.

The two words? Emotional intelligence.

Granted, the scenario I described is unlikely, but the odds are that you’ll find yourself trying to identify what emotional intelligence entails are much higher — especially if you want to help your team to improve theirs.

That’s why I got sucked into a recent article in The Harvard Gazette in which Ronald Siegel, a Harvard Medical School psychology professor, outlined some of the keys to emotional intelligence.

As someone who has read an awful lot of these over the years, I found his perspective instructive. I recommend the whole thing, but here are my 5 biggest takeaways:

Get a handle on what’s going on inside you.

Let’s start with the easy one, right? But don’t worry, you don’t have to overcome deep webs of psychosis. It’s more about building an objective awareness of your emotions and recognizing that other people have the same stuff going on.

“The first component is self-awareness, which means being conscious of our own thoughts, feelings, and what’s happening inside of us,” Siegel said.

One of my favorite examples of someone learning from not doing this comes from Warren Buffett, who spoke many times about how he originally bought control of Berkshire Hathaway — at the time, a struggling textile firm — purely because he was offended by the CEO and wanted to fire him.

“I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business,” he explained. “This is $200 billion because the genius here thought he could run a textile business.”

Don’t let your emotions run the show.

Having recognized your emotions, separate them from your reaction — or at least, if you’re going to react emotionally, do so in a constructive way.

• Putting in extra effort to achieve a worthwhile goal, and inspiring yourself by thinking about how disappointed and embarrassed you’ll be if you fail? Good.
• Allowing that same fear of failure to push you to keep pursuing a goal after you’ve reassessed how valuable it actually is? Maybe not so good.

“Emotional intelligence is a particular skill of recognizing one’s own feelings, working with those feelings, and not just reacting in ways that are going to be problematic,” Siegel said.

Pay attention to other people’s feelings.

This takeaway is one of my favorites because it’s easy to misinterpret. When we were children, we were told to pay attention to others’ feelings so that we wouldn’t hurt them — basically, so that we’d be nicer to people and get along better.

Sometimes that’s enough.

But emotional intelligence requires more. It’s a morally neutral awareness of how other people react emotionally, so that you can use that information to improve the odds that you’ll achieve your goals.

Fantastic example: The CEO who offended Buffett so much that he convinced him to overpay for a struggling textile business.

Was it intentional? I don’t know. But if it was, it was also a highly emotionally intelligent move.

Learn to work well with teams.

We’re going to get a bit Socratic with this one — namely, the Euthyphro dilemma.

It’s O.K. if you don’t remember this from philosophy class, and in fact, I had to look it up to be sure. But, it comes down to the question of whether, in the Greek pantheon:

Do the gods love things that are pious because are pious, or
Do things become pious because they are loved by the gods?

I think we have a similar dilemma here, in questioning whether people who have highly developed senses of emotional intelligence are more likely to work well in teams, or whether the ability to work well with teams is itself a component of emotional intelligence.

As Siegel put it, we’re talking about “social skills, which is the ability to work well in teams, to be able to solve conflicts and help the team to cooperate.”

Beware of drama.

This might be the most on-point possible advice of our time, since we live in an era of instant communication, virality — and drama.

And, it gets in the way of getting things done.

“We humans are grossly inefficient in trying to get things done because most of our energy is spent on trying to make sure we look good, or on making sure that people think of us in a certain way, or on getting triggered by one another,” Siegel said.

Emotional intelligence directly tackles this waste of resources.

“I suspect that business leaders have realized that it’s relatively easy to get technical expertise in almost anything, but to get people who can understand and get along with one another, that is a challenge,” he said. “In many projects, there is a growing awareness that this skill is going to be the one that carries the day.”

A good place to start

I find the whole concept of emotional intelligence fascinating.

But like you, I’m most interested in practical, actionable strategies: how to choose the right words, how to see things through other people’s eyes, and how to use things like silence and humor to communicate more effectively.

These 5 simple habits are a pretty good place to start.