Emotional intelligence for first-time managers: five habits worth building

The step from doing the work to managing the people who do it is one of the hardest in any career. The skills that earned the promotion — speed, expertise, getting things done personally — are no longer enough. What the new role demands is a different kind of skill: noticing and managing emotions, your own and other people’s.

Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer gave this ability a name in 1990: emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman popularised it in his 1995 book of the same name and later applied it to the workplace, describing five components:

• Self-awareness: knowing your own emotions, strengths and limits, and how they affect others.
• Self-regulation: managing disruptive impulses and moods; thinking before acting.
• Motivation: a drive to achieve for its own sake, and optimism when things go wrong.
• Empathy: understanding other people’s emotional make-up and treating them accordingly.
• Social skill: managing relationships, building networks and finding common ground.

Researchers still debate how best to define and measure emotional intelligence. But for a first-time manager, the practical question is simpler: what can I do differently on Monday? Here are five habits, each tied to one component.

1. Name the feeling before you respond (self-awareness)

When a deadline slips or a colleague pushes back in a meeting, notice what you are feeling and put a word to it: frustrated, anxious, embarrassed. The act of naming creates a small gap between feeling and reaction, and that gap is where good decisions are made. At the end of each week, jot down one moment when your mood shaped how you treated someone. Patterns appear quickly.

2. Wait before sending (self-regulation)

The angry email is the classic management mistake because it is so easy. Make it a rule: anything written in irritation waits an hour, or until the next morning. Re-read it as the person receiving it. Most of the time you will soften it; sometimes you will not send it at all. Neither outcome costs you anything.

3. Connect the task to a reason (motivation)

Self-motivation matters, but a manager’s real job is to help others find theirs. When you assign work, spend one sentence on why it matters: who it helps, what it makes possible. People work harder on tasks they understand, and they recover faster from setbacks when they believe the goal is worth it.

4. Listen to understand, not to reply (empathy)

In your next one-to-one conversation, try to finish by summarising what the other person said and how they seem to feel about it, before offering any solution. “So the problem isn’t the workload as much as not knowing what’s coming next week — that’s what’s making it stressful?” If you have got it wrong, they will correct you, and you will have learned something you would otherwise have missed.

5. Give credit in public, feedback in private (social skill)

Few habits build trust faster. Praise specifically and openly, so the whole team knows what good work looks like. Raise concerns one-to-one, calmly, focused on the behaviour rather than the person. Over time your team learns that you are fair, and fairness is the foundation that every other relationship skill rests on.

Practising, not performing

Emotional intelligence can look like a personality trait — some people seem to have it naturally. But each of these habits is a behaviour, and behaviours improve with practice and feedback. Pick one habit for a month. Ask a colleague you trust to tell you when they see it, and when they don’t. You will be surprised how quickly it stops feeling like a technique and starts feeling like the way you work.

For my students: the study notes on Goleman’s five components cover the theory in more depth, with self-check questions.