Emotional intelligence (EQ), the ability to effectively notice and manage emotions in ourselves and others, is an important skill to have — as humans, and as medical practice managers.
High emotional intelligence can create an environment that feels more rewarding for everyone!
Emotional Intelligence helps you:
- Reduce conflict: For example, you may bridge the gap between a less emotionally-intelligent provider and a team member.
- Understand different perspectives: Even when a point of view isn’t your own, a high EQ can help you see where that person is coming from.
- Make people feel seen and heard: This is a deep human need, and a person with high EQ is naturally able to give it to those around them.
Ultimately, this helps to:
- Unify the team, so everybody is working together.
- Create loyalty and have a longstanding team who grows together.
- Attract like-minded team members, with high emotional intelligence.
- Increase the quality of service provided to patients, thereby creating loyalty from them!
When emotional intelligence starts at the top — from you — it sets a wonderful example for your team and how they can respond to emotionally-charged situations. But…
As a practice manager, can too much emotional intelligence hurt you?
Profound empathy can add stress to your life, and also impact your boundaries. Some highly sensitive people may take responsibility for other people’s anger, frustration or sadness, and it may impact their ability to make the decisions necessary to run a successful medical practice.
If you have called upon your natural emotional intelligence to help an employee acclimate, yet they continue to break rules or not meet the standards of their role, you have to fire them. (Of course, it helps when you can do that in an emotionally intelligent way.)
Extremely high emotional intelligence can:
- Prevent you from making big decisions.
- Result in people taking advantage of you.
- Lead you to handle the “bad” employees so empathetically that you frustrate the good employees.
Emotional intelligence, yes.
Boundaries, also yes.
Success — in all areas — is about balance!
At Great Practice Design, we have modules to help foster your team’s Emotional Intelligence.
We also have modules to help you create and implement clearer boundaries.