When your kitchen introduces a new menu, you know that for the next few weeks or months you’ll quite often be preparing the same ingredients everyday. Soon you’ll probably be able to do the prep with your eyes closed, but that’s not how you do things, is it, chef?
Because you’re working with fresh ingredients, you tune in every single day to what your supplier has delivered. You respond to how it feels, how fresh it is, to signs of ripeness or maturity. You see it for what it is.
That’s no different to being a leader. Everyone on your team is a unique individual, each going through a unique set of circumstances everyday. At its most basic level, emotional intelligence is your ability to tune into the people you work with and handle your interpersonal relationships from that place of awareness of ‘the other’.
And it’s fundamental to your success as a leader: can you see how much easier it is to draw the best out of your team when you enjoy close connections with them?
And how can you develop this quality if you’re an aspiring leader? Do the same thing you do with your prep: see every person for who and what they are, without holding judgements. After all, you’re only able to see things from the outside. You have no idea what it is to experience life as them, right, chef?