Emotional Intelligence & Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship requires you to have an intricate understanding of the world of business. The business world is often portrayed as absolutely cut-throat and vicious in the pursuit of success, but the reality is that a great deal of emotional intelligence is required to run a successful business. Emotional intelligence and emotional IQ will get you much further in the business world than raw drive and talent alone because at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur is really about being able to connect and work with other people.

Emotional Intelligence In Business Planning

Any entrepreneur worth their salt knows that developing and implementing a strong business plan is essential to successfully start up a new business. Business plans are living documents that basically act as a roadmap for your business and allow you to continually review and adapt your business to new developments or changing demographics. In order to make your business plan the most effective that it can be, developing it with emotional intelligence is paramount.

While any good business plan will have plenty of solid data to back up the decisions made about marketing efforts and analysis, emotional intelligence brings something more intangible but uniquely important to the table. Great entrepreneurs are successful largely because of their innate intuition which stems from their capacity for emotional intelligence. Data alone can only get you so far when developing a business plan, but the ability to intuit what the right decision is and understand how business moves will impact relationships is vital.

When you begin a business with emotional intelligence guiding your decisions, that same emotional intelligence will continue to influence every aspect of your business going forward. Your employees will go on to mirror the empathy that you start your business with, and customers too will appreciate the emotional intelligence you put into your business design, even if it isn’t openly visible to outside observers.

Marketing, Branding, And Emotional Intelligence

As marketing and branding methods shift from more traditional methods to digital ones, customers and businesses are closer than ever in their ability to interact with one another. Entrepreneurs understand that a strong digital presence is important to the continued success of a business and that presence must exist across multiple platforms. Digital marketing and branding aren’t just about sending out personalized emails but maintaining an active and impactful presence on social media.

Emotional intelligence plays a huge part in how successful a business’s online presence can be. Looking at Twitter you can see that brands like Wendy’s have taken the platform by storm on account of their deft usage of emotional intelligence in their marketing efforts. Motivation, empathy, self-awareness, and social skills are all necessary to digital marketing and branding implementing emotional intelligence. This allows customers to feel a more intimate and real connection with a brand that simply wasn’t possible via traditional marketing and branding models.

Whether you’re branding or marketing your first small business or fiftieth, understanding the unique brand attributes that make your business special is important and made possible through emotional intelligence. This can help you to better connect with your target audience and develop a strong brand identity that inspires loyalty and consumers are drawn to. Emotional intelligence in your marketing and branding will help you to stay far more relevant in the digital era and increase your customer base significantly.

Inspiring Creativity And Boosting Emotional Intelligence

Successful businesses thrive on creativity. Everything from the products or services a business provides to its customer service, marketing efforts, and the website it operates with all rely heavily on creativity. Creativity and emotional intelligence go hand in hand and improving one can allow for natural improvement of the other. A business’s ability to stand out from the crowd rests on its ability to think and operate creatively.

There is actually science to back up the idea that emotional intelligence is directly related to creative capacity. This is great news for entrepreneurs because, while natural creativity can’t exactly be taught, it is possible to improve upon and teach emotional intelligence which in turn can help to boost creativity. If everyone at every level of any given business works to enhance their emotional intelligence and creativity, new and novel solutions to problems will undoubtedly begin popping up at record numbers.

Creativity can also be improved and capitalized upon in a number of ways to maximize its effect on your business. Scheduling an outdoor weekend camping retreat for your company will get everyone out into nature which has been shown to improve creative thinking. Additionally, allowing employees to take regular breaks to walk around can help to clear their heads and improve creative thought, even if it is just a short walk around the block.

Emotional intelligence is essential when it comes to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Whether you’re first planning your business, looking to become a star of digital marketing and branding, or simply trying to improve creativity in yourself and your team, emotional intelligence is the key to making it happen.