Why building emotionally intelligent teams is important

March 3, 2022

Are you facing trouble building great teams at work?

A great team translates directly into great output, but building that team doesn’t come easy. In a world that values empathy, sensitivity, and inclusivity, the last few years have seen radical changes when it comes to hiring new employees. In traditional business practices, organizations would hire based on an applicant’s resume, academic credentials, letters of recommendation, and other objective criteria. While these factors do help determine the credibility and suitability of an applicant for a role, it is difficult to determine who would be a good fit with the existing team, and promote a healthy work culture.

This is exactly where most organizations feel stuck.

However, what they are now recognizing is the value of emotional intelligence while hiring. You’d find multiple definitions of EI on the internet but this one fits in well.

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to identify, understand, and control one’s own emotions, as well as the ability to comprehend and influence the emotions of others.

It entails being aware that emotions drive behaviors and have a positive or bad impact on individuals. Let’s break this down a little more.

When stuck in a high-pressure situation, or dealing with a tough situation at work, these traits matter. You can handle interpersonal relationships empathetically, for instance, if you are emotionally intelligent. Thus, having high emotional intelligence can subsequently help you achieve professional goals.

But should emotional intelligence be a factor while hiring? YES!

According to research published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, a strong foundation in emotional intelligence improves one’s ability to make sound decisions, build and sustain collaborative relationships, deal effectively with stress, and cope to a greater degree with constant change [1].

To simply put it, emotional intelligence helps a person to not just excel at work, but also to achieve a variety of other aims and ambitions in life. It entails understanding different parts of your feelings and emotions, as well as devoting time to developing self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

There are different ways this plays out at work. Workers with higher EQ than their colleagues are said to:

  • Make better decisions
  • Keep their cool under pressure and stress
  • Skillfully settle disagreements
  • Respond favorably to constructive feedback
  • Collaborate well
  • Demonstrate leadership characteristics
  • Have a higher degree of self-awareness

Furthermore, those with high EQ are more likely to succeed and thrive within organizations. A survey conducted by TalentSmart, showed that 90% of top performers were high in emotional intelligence, with a higher average income per year. This can not be a coincidence. The survey went on to further indicate that emotional intelligence also accounted for up to 60% of job performance for supervisors through CEOs.

While this clearly shows that people with high EQ tend to perform better, the term “Emotional Intelligence” can seem vast and daunting. EI can come to mean different things for different workplaces, which may lead you to ask: “What are the right EQ traits for me?”

What you need are traits that are pertinent to emotional intelligence in the universal workplace, while having the individual freedom to develop traits that you personally feel the need to work on.

To help you navigate the world of EI at the workplace, we, at Skillr, have identified 17 emotional intelligence traits that are crucial at work:

  1. Emotional Self Awareness
  2. Accurate Self Assessment
  3. Self confidence
  4. Empathy
  5. Organizational Awareness
  6. Emotional Self-control
  7. Transparency
  8. Adaptability
  9. Achievement
  10. Initiative
  11. Optimism / Positive Outlook
  12. Developing Others / Coach & Mentor
  13. Inspirational Leadership
  14. Change Catalyst
  15. Influence (Persuasion)
  16. Conflict Management
  17. Teamwork and Collaboration

This exhaustive selection of emotional intelligence traits along with our behavioral skills, form the foundation of our organizational framework Skill Flex® that powers Skillr to unlock actionable data on skills and build future-ready teams.

👉 Organizations are using Skill Flex® to hire fast and right

In a world with rapidly-changing work environments, it is these skills and traits that will set individuals up for success. Companies are today looking at investing in people and empowering their workforce. Skill Flex makes this easier by using ethical AI and this skills framework to provide an objective hiring solution.

Written by Aryaman Kakkar

To know more about how emotional intelligence traits are relevant to the future of work, visit skillr.ai


Fundamento reduces your setup time from months to minutes.

70% faster onboarding than other tools with enterprise-grade security and multilateral data visualization.