Putting the pieces together

We’re on week five of our Emotional Intelligence Series. Yes, it’s wrapping up next week! Check out the archives for the first, second, third, and fourth issues of the series. We’ll be exploring the last dimension of emotional intelligence this week: relationship management.

Relationship management is about combining all your skills towards a greater purpose, thereby enhancing your interactions and long-term relationships. After all, that’s the point of EQ—to help you navigate yourself and your interactions with others. Self-awareness and self-management set the conditions for your success, allowing you to understand yourself and manage your emotions and responses to them.

Social awareness is your ability to identify and understand the emotions of others. You have the tools to navigate any relationship when you understand your emotions, can manage your emotions, and understand the emotions of others. Suddenly, your anger doesn’t get the best of you, even when dealing with another person who is letting their emotions run out of control. Being in control of your emotions puts you in control of the situation, allowing you to manage and control the relationship.

From your view, you can easily offer grace and accept the apology of the one who wronged you in anger. However, had you acted in anger, you’d be at his mercy, just as he is at yours. Relationship management helps you remain in control of your social interactions, helping you have successful interactions.

The compound effect:

The benefits of relationship management are lofty because they rely on the compound effects of all the work done in the other three dimensions of emotional intelligence. These benefits are the result of much hard labor. It will take time to work through the first three steps, especially with new relationships that bring about new feelings and new social interactions to understand.

You’ll reap the benefits below when you act with intention, not emotion, understand your employees by showing empathy, and seek to build a genuine relationship built on trust.

The Benefits of Relationship Management

• Higher Coaching and Development Impact
  Strong relationships make it easier for leaders to give honest feedback and support growth because trust lowers defensiveness.

• Better Performance Conversations
  Relationship management allows leaders to hold others accountable with both firmness and empathy, making performance management less adversarial.

• Healthier Work Culture
  When relationship skills are high across leadership, it fosters psychological safety, reduces toxicity, and builds a sense of shared purpose.

• Increased Influence Without Formal Authority
  Leaders who build strong connections can influence outcomes and decisions—even without positional power—by earning goodwill and social capital

Your relationship management skills are what will allow you to influence others, build strong teams, and generate alignment toward mission success. One of my passions is helping leaders achieve alignment with their teams and the business's needs. I’ve found that leaders who build trust have the most aligned and dedicated teams. It’s because their leader took the time to understand them, which led to improved communication, in turn leading to more effective conversations and a stronger relationship.

It doesn’t take much to change the trajectory of your team. You can focus on having small, consistent interactions that flourish into lasting relationships. Lean into the empathy we discussed last week, and go build stronger relationships!

How to practice:

Practicing relationship management is hard. It’s more like you’re playing in the actual game than you are practicing. There are some small steps you can take, but no matter what, you’ll be interacting with other people. So, it’s not just practice; it’s also real life. But we can make it seem less daunting with the four ideas:

1. The first step is to consistently practice and evaluate your skills in self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness. Enhancing any of these skills will improve your relationships. We don’t want the skills to atrophy; practicing these three regularly is the best way to enhance your relationships.

2. Spend time building trust. Don’t treat every interaction as do or die. You can recover from bad interactions, but you have to put in work. Again, consistency is what really pays off here. You have to start small and build up. As a leader, treat every interaction as a small step toward building more trust. 

3. Have uncomfortable conversations. Don’t put off difficult conversations. If you have to deliver negative feedback, be like Nike and just do it! The more you choose to put yourself in these situations, the more comfortable and skilled you’ll become.

4. Practice acknowledging emotions rather than offering solutions. This one simple tip can help you drastically when interacting with others (it’s something I’m constantly working on). Check out this video below to see what I mean.

Enhancing your relationships is more of a mindset than a singular act. You should focus on building trust through empathy, managing your emotions effectively, and responding appropriately, while also working to understand the emotions of others. Consistently doing these things, while practicing and evaluating your skills regularly, is what will help you reap the benefits we discussed earlier, such as improved job performance, stronger relationships, and increased chances of promotion and long-term success. After all, EQ is the most in-demand leadership skill out there today!

Well, that’s the end of the road for our series. We’ll be wrapping things up next week, and I’ll be providing a lot more resources for you to continue building your EQ skills.

Before you leave:

Feel free to reply directly to this email if I can help you on your journey. Or if you want to introduce yourself, I’d love to hear from you too!

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel for more content like this and other leadership topics!

And, one last thing to check out…

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI