In many ways, being an effective leader boils down to your ability to influence people—a proficiency that is driven by one’s emotional intelligence (EQ). Leadership is more about soft skills—the ability to inspire, persuade, guide, sway, and communicate in a way that’s “heard” rather than just “listened to”—than it is about being the best in terms of hard skills.

As a leader, if you don’t understand your team’s motivations and feelings, you’ll never be able to establish an optimally functioning team and reap the copious rewards related thereto. The result is needless opportunity loss.

To become more adept at such soft management skills, leaders can actively work to improve their EQ. This effort includes—and actually starts with—understanding your own emotions and triggers. What motivates and demotivates you, evokes feelings of stress or satisfaction, compels you to go above and beyond, or not participate at all? You can conduct these inner-exploration exercises on your own in a journal or daily walk, perhaps, while some leaders amp up the effort by conducting self-assessments with a coach, mentor, or therapist.

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