The 4 Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence (Part 3): Understand Others

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development   Leadership   Talent Management  

Emotional intelligence (or emotional quotient, EI or EQ) is widely viewed as a skill that leaders need to master to deliver results through others. As a quick summary, my lens on EI consists of four building blocks:

1. Know Thyself – Understanding your strengths and weaknesses
2. Control Thyself – Recognizing how your actions impact others
3. Understand Others – Observing the strengths, weaknesses and emotions of others
4. Relate for Results – Synthesizing how to adapt, coach, mentor, influence, and advise to deliver results

The three blocks are all necessary prerequisites for the fourth, which is the rationale for expressing as follows:

You’ve likely heard the term reading the room, when a person observes words, tone and actions to get a sense of others’ sentiments and expectations. Most of the great leaders I have worked with and for in my career were exceptional at reading the room. They also used that sense to better understand others through employing empathy.

Dictionary.com defines empathy as the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts, or attitudes of another. It’s more than just reading the room, it’s taking what you can glean and adjusting your actions to better meet the situation.

When my father died, we held a five-hour wake for people to come and pay …

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