Role of emotional intelligence in project management

As said by Jessica McPeake –Akamai senior director of technical enablement, “High emotional intelligence has become a highly valued quality in leaders.” The role play of emotional intelligence has escalated as a greatest prognosticator of fruition in the organization. This is the reason why emotional intelligence has brought into consideration in project management. Only proper technical knowledge cannot bring success to a project but a well addressed knowledge of technicality required, leads to successful accomplishment of a project. For the projection of activities to meet the project requirements, the most critical skill to be mastered is understanding your own emotions which will affect your performance. For a clear visionary, participative, instructive and positive guidance style one must have control on his emotions so that one can lead a team well in the project.

According to Schmidt 2012, the most fascinating verity regarding emotional intelligence is that people with high EI earn $29.000 annually more than their social group with low EI and more than intelligence quotient which accounts 4-25% of our job performance, about 58% of our job performance is held responsible on emotional intelligence. Thus, we see for better operation emotional intelligence is of great magnitude. Among the five components of emotional intelligence empathy is of great essence. How to relate with people and make crucial decisions requires time. Also how to give constructive feedback, motivate employees and maintaining momentum during changes in the organization requires great soft skills.

When it comes to project management how emotional intelligence mechanism underpins all the management ideologies can be explained with this instance- Three MBA students went for their summer internship program in which they were been given a project on commercial awareness. They were been asked to find the target audience for their project and let them know about the product. They decided to go to the local market where they can find maximum number of consumers. Where one student had a conversation with a person who already had a job, the second student conversed with 12^th passed student and the last one with a person who was left out from college and was not able to pursue higher education. What they found were students who were 12^th pass and who were interested to pursue jobs after graduation but due to low budget couldn’t were interested to listen. Among the three, two students were able to find to identify the consumers they required. How to identify customers is not a training given but it’s the ability of an individual to identify by judging their emotions and how to utilize the soft skills at the present moment. Ultimately the two students were able to get 40 leads as compared to the third student who got 8 leads. Hence, we see how emotional intelligence helped them in accomplishing their task and generating customers for their product.

In the following task, the neuro linguistic programming which is very relevant to personal and interpersonal relations helped in getting customers. Also we have studied in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can fairly certain the people who are struggling with basic needs and other concepts related to soft skills help in engaging the customer. All together all the management principles have been underpinned in emotional intelligence which lead to the successful completion of the project. Also we can conclude that emotional intelligence is the foundation of all critical skills. As stated by Daniel Goleman, “Leaders with a greater range of emotional intelligence skills can employ more diverse leadership styles. The more styles you can leverage based on a given situation, the more effective you will be as a leader”. Emotional intelligence is vital in project management.