How can you leverage your emotional intelligence to motivate and inspire your team?

Assessing your emotional intelligence and empathy levels can help you take action to motivate and inspire your team. Start by reflecting on how your own emotions impact your interactions with others. Next, focus on how you can better understand and connect with your team members' emotions and perspectives. Practice active listening and seek to understand their viewpoints, rather than being defensive or dismissive. Demonstrate empathy, active listening, and emotional awareness in your interactions with team members, and create a supportive work environment that encourages teamwork, collaboration, and innovation. So, don't just assess your skills – put them into action and watch your team thrive!

In my experience, professional leaders often struggle with bridging comprehensive goals and true real-world business operations that change on a daily basis. Understanding how to motivate your team, and keeping a level conversation in consideration of their current situation is a true art that requires skill, tact, and experience to develop talent without causing attrition.

One of the strategies I use for active listening is called paraphrasing. When someone shares their thoughts, feelings, or ideas, I paraphrase them back to ensure I'm clear on what they shared. This helps me understand them and lets them know they were heard.

Working with clients to learn these skills I teach them the following. I learned this exercise from SIYLI (Search inside yourself leadership institute) based on active listening. You have two people sit facing each other and they take turns talking. The first person (A) talks for a full minute. The other person (B) just listens. No vocal bursts (uh huh, yeah etc) maybe nod but their task it to pay 100% attention to the person talking. Then you switch roles and (B) talks and (A) listens without interruption. Then you spend a minute in mutual conversation where both parties get a chance to communicate. It is a powerful way to learn how to just listen and see how empowering it is to have someone fully listen to you.

In order for people to gain clarity on others point of view and teach them empathy I teach them perceptual positions. For sake of brevity (and space) I will shorten it. The client imagines a conversation they may have (or did have and need clarity on) and first they think of the conversation from the POV of looking through their own eyes and imagine their thoughts. Then they float out of their body and into the other persons and look through the other persons eyes. Seeing the conversation from their perspective. Then you have them float up above both people seeing themselves and the other person in conversation and see what comes up from that perspective. Very powerful to gain awareness of another viewpoint.

Everyone communicates differently, and there can be a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications if team members don’t understand each others’ varying communication styles. As the manager of a remote team, it’s up to you to understand how the individuals that make up your team prefer to communicate so that you can help them improve their communication habits and facilitate a work environment that benefits everyone.