While not a new concept by any means, it’s only in recent years that the idea of emotional intelligence has been taken seriously in the mainstream. In the business world, it’s now widely acknowledged that a high emotional quotient or “EQ” is a better predictor of success than either intelligence or education. This has made emotional intelligence training a seriously compelling proposition in today’s intensely competitive business environment.

Here are just a few of the reasons managers should try emotional intelligence training if they haven’t already:

1. It can help build better harmony between work and home life

In most cases, emotional intelligence training isn’t necessarily focused solely on helping managers and business owners do better in business. At the executive level, it becomes impractical, if not impossible to separate the personal and business spheres of life, as problems in one area tend to reflect in the other.

This inherent conflict can lead to emotional issues that may not come into the fore until it’s too late, severely impacting the quality of life overall. Emotional intelligence training can help business owners and executives achieve a better quality of life by allowing them to avoid making compulsive decisions that are influenced by events in different areas of their lives.

While it may not necessarily solve all work-life balance issues, it will certainly go a long way into helping you understand what it is you need to do to make an acceptable balance possible.

2. Better risk management

Emotional intelligence training can be key to rational risk management. There’s a fine line between gambling and rational risk assessment, with the line often being crossed due to the manager’s moods, personal opinions, or some other factor that makes the decision less rational. EQ training can make it easier to let go of emotions or at least prevent them from interfering with critical decisions involving your business.

3. EQ training can help you understand your own motives

It’s very difficult to understand how we can improve our emotional lives if we don’t even have the vocabulary to describe what’s happening. It can be impossible to improve our decision-making if we don’t even understand the role our own feelings play in them.

Taking EQ classes can be a wonderful way of contextualizing your feelings with situations you encounter at work and at home. And once you have the context, you will find it much easier to make the decisions that will take you and your business where you want it to go.

4. Better interpersonal skills

An emotional intelligence class may even be the key to helping you interact better with employees, customers, suppliers, and everyone else you will have to talk to. Not all of us are necessarily gifted with the knack or the upbringing that gives us the ability to easily read between the lines when we communicate with others. Emotional training can go a long way to into helping you understand what is really being said when you talk to people over the course of your day.

5. Better empathy

And with all these learning comes a better grasp of how other people feel. This, in turn, can give you a better insight into how they might act. Better empathy is necessary for reducing the uncertainty that comes with making projections about the future, as well as making better marketing, advertising, product development, and staffing decisions.

What are your experiences with your own emotional intelligence classes? We’d love to know!