Emotional Intelligence at Work: Four Skills Every Leader Can Strengthen
Responding to a tense conversation, listening to a colleague, or managing your own reactions help define effective leadership. Learn four emotional intelligence skills you can practice to build stronger relationships, navigate workplace challenges, and help others succeed.
Why do some leaders earn trust, navigate conflict with confidence, and bring out the best in their teams? Technical expertise matters—but it's rarely enough on its own.
The most effective leaders recognize their own emotions, understand what others are experiencing, and respond with intention. These are the skills of emotional intelligence, and they're not fixed personality traits. They're practical abilities you can develop with practice.
In the Michigan Online course Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions, instructors Jeffrey Sanchez Burks and Cheri Alexander, both of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, introduce the Two-by-Four Model of Social-Emotional Intelligence. Learners engage with this practical framework to build stronger workplace relationships, make better decisions, and lead more effectively.
Four Skills That Improve Leadership
1. Build Self-Awareness
Leadership starts with understanding yourself.
Self-awareness means recognizing your emotions, motivations, strengths, and blind spots. It also means understanding how your actions affect the people around you. While reflection is important, meaningful growth often comes from feedback. Colleagues can reveal habits and behaviors that are difficult to see on your own, helping you become a more effective leader over time.
2. Practice Self-Management
Recognizing your emotions is only the first step. The next step is choosing how to respond.
Self-management is the ability to replace unproductive habits with behaviors that support your goals. That might mean staying composed during a difficult conversation, approaching disagreement with curiosity instead of defensiveness, or following through on commitments even under pressure. The course introduces practical strategies—including goal setting, accountability, and ongoing feedback—to help turn good intentions into lasting habits.
3. Strengthen Social Awareness
Great leaders pay attention to people and not just projects.
Social awareness is the ability to recognize what others are feeling and respond thoughtfully. Research highlighted in the course shows that teams perform better when members demonstrate social sensitivity and share participation more evenly. Leaders who notice subtle cues, invite quieter colleagues into discussions, and recognize when someone needs support create environments where collaboration can thrive.
4. Help Others Succeed (Social Acceleration)
Leadership isn't just about your own performance. It's about helping others do their best work.
Social acceleration focuses on strengthening relationships through coaching, mentoring, storytelling, and teaching. These behaviors build trust, encourage learning, and create workplaces where people feel comfortable contributing ideas, asking questions, and growing together.
Why Emotional Intelligence Matters
Today's workplace demands more than technical expertise. Leaders must navigate change, build trust across teams, communicate clearly, and make thoughtful decisions in uncertain situations.
Emotional intelligence helps you meet those challenges. By developing greater self-awareness, managing your reactions, understanding the people around you, and helping others succeed, you can become a more effective leader, teammate, and collaborator.
The most encouraging part? Emotional intelligence isn't something you're born with or without. It's a set of skills you can strengthen through intentional practice—skills that can improve not only how you lead, but how you work with others every day.
Ready to Strengthen Your Emotional Intelligence?
Understanding the four dimensions of emotional intelligence is a start. The next step is putting them into practice in the conversations, relationships, and decisions you encounter at work.
In Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions, you’ll build on these ideas through research, assessments, animated scenarios, and opportunities to examine your own and others’ behaviors. The fully online non-credit course is accessible anytime, allowing you to fit learning into your busy schedule.
What You’ll Learn
- Explore the possibility of being simultaneously more emotionally attuned and professional at work.
- Model how to deal with difficult or critical conversations and how to hold more productive conversations.
- Recognize and understand how information is conveyed in a non-verbal manner.
The course gives you an opportunity to move from understanding emotional intelligence to examining how it shapes real interactions—including how you respond under pressure, read other people, and approach challenging conversations.
Enroll in Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions and continue building the skills that can help you communicate, collaborate, and lead more effectively.
