There is an emotional component in all of our interpersonal dealings and expressing emotion at work is one of the trickiest workplace issues.
While your cognitive intelligence often plays a stronger role in helping you get hired, it is your 'emotional intelligence' that determines where you end up in your career.
Emotional intelligence is simply your capacity to deal effectively with your own and others' emotions. In the workplace, it can determine how confident you are, how well you take the initiative, how effective a team player you are, and how well you handle
conflicts.
Getting honest feedback from people around you to develop a profile of your perceived strengths and weaknesses is a way to begin increasing your emotional intelligence. This strategy helped Peter Benton, 39, develop his leadership abilities and get assessments of his emotional intelligence. Working with a coach, he got his boss, several peers and number of employees who reported to him to provide feedback.
He says the coaching helped him develop a number of skills, including maintaining calm under pressure. He knew he was on the right track when a subordinate came up to him one day and said, "I don't know what you're doing different lately, but you're acting like a different person, and I feel we're more of a team."
For people interested in increasing their emotional intelligence, there are a number of self and multi-rater (360-degree feedback) emotional intelligence assessments available in the online Self Assessment Center
Source: The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2004