You're leading a research team. How can you cultivate essential emotional intelligence skills for success?

To build emotional intelligence in your team, lead by example with self-awareness and encourage open feedback. Help everyone manage stress through mindfulness or staying calm under pressure. Keep the team motivated by connecting their work to bigger goals and celebrating their achievements. Lastly, show empathy by really listening and understanding how people feel—it’ll make them feel more supported and valued.

In our team, we developed a researcher competency skillset, which consists of several skill groups. Every six months, stakeholders evaluate each researcher using this skillset, allowing us to track their skill development. Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of the key skill groups, consisting of more specific skills, such as self-awareness. Each grade is tied to concrete skill scores, so if a researcher wants to grow, they need to improve their EI skills

Cultivate emotional intelligence, communicate openly, listen actively, be empathic, encourage teamwork, and recognize achievements. Conflicts must be handled sensitively and support in such a manner that creates a positive environment that enhances cohesion and productivity in teams.

Active listening and allowing your team to engage is a crucial component of research management. Efficient researching and prototyping can be achieved when everyone understands the innovation and can come up with different iterations of a method to try and test. Practice allowing everyone to speak up, ask questions and brainstorm together to promote active listening and participation within your team

Feedback loops are crucial for building resilience and adaptability in complex research management environments. When recognized and effectively utilized, they aid in collaborative decision-making and promote systems thinking. For example, incorporating regular feedback sessions during project phases allows team members to share insights on progress, challenges, and adjustments. Aggregating feedback from multiple stakeholders is especially useful for identifying opportunities to improve governance and management strategies. Feedback loops help shape understanding, behavior, and outcomes in adaptive systems over long project timelines, making them highly relevant in research management fields that handle uncertainty and nonlinear dynamics.

It is absolutely necessary to work with an experienced team for critical tasks. Risks and consequences should be explained to the team before the project begins. In this way, the team knows what kind of situations they may encounter and can be prepared. Communication between team members should be strong, and each member should be informed about what the other members are doing. This helps to provide support within the team. The manager should follow the entire process and team members. they should notice members who are struggling or feeling stuck before they become even more overwhelmed. Normally, micromanagement is not recommended for managers.However, in risky and stressful tasks, micromanagement can be applied without creating pressure

Research can unexpectedly change from findings, stakeholder preferences or even interests within the team. Shifts in direction leads to many works being put on pause or works that are left behind. This can be frustrating and stressful for a lot of engineers and researchers. It’s critical as a leader to be able to communicate the unknowns and manage expectations to help reduce this stress. Practice transparency. Practice healthy communication.