5 Emotional Intelligence Tenets to Elevate Your Leadership

Vikramaditya has 7+ years of experience in hydraulics and mechanical engineering. His interest lies in working with the human element of the project—understanding customer needs, engaging stakeholders, and negotiations. He has worked with teams from all over the world and led multi-million-dollar international projects. He is passionate about start-ups and new product introduction projects.

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Topics: Leadership

One of the most daunting challenges for a project manager is to ensure that their team members are aligned in their pursuit of a shared objective. To get the team to perform optimally, the project manager must establish a high level of credibility and trust with it.

Most project managers rely on these three fundamentals to make measured decisions:

• theoretical knowledge
• guidance from subject matter experts
• people’s experience

Often, experience outweighs theoretical knowledge. Since experience cannot be acquired overnight, there must be another way to establish credibility—which is the predecessor to “influencing without authority.”

Here's another conundrum: Most project managers do not have their team members as direct reports. Due to this limitation, the PMs have no authority to enforce decisions or set priorities. Thus, project managers must rely on wisdom to communicate effectively and ensure the team follows their lead for the success of the project.

How can one influence without authority? The answer lies in the confines of emotional intelligence, which has become crucial for nearly all leadership roles. In essence, emotional intelligence is the skill and capacity to perceive and assess emotions. It stands as one of the most vital elements of influential leadership.

Over the years, I have paid particular attention to my…

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