My classmates and I just recently finished the Business Immersion Program (BIP) with the Center for Innovation Business and Entrepreneurship (CIBE). The BIP was the perfect introduction to the CIBE program and makes me excited for the next few years. It reached a variety of different areas of business, providing tons of value in each.
When reflecting, one of the key topics that stood out was Emotional Intelligence, brought to us by Alejandro Reyna ’17. When one refers to intelligence they typically are referring to IQ, so it was definitely a look at a new kind of intelligence. Alejandro helped us to dive into this concept while showing us how it can benefit us in our everyday lives as well as our careers. We started by analyzing an article from Harvard’s Business School regarding EQ. The article broke down emotional intelligence into four categories: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Between four sessions with Alejandro, we honed in on each one of these.
Self-awareness means understanding your strengths and weaknesses, but also the ability to recognize your emotions and the effect they have on you and your team’s performance. In my
opinion, this is the most important one because you must get your own emotions in check before you can help lead your team.
Self-management means possessing optimism especially when you or your team is under fire. We talked a lot about making sure that we respond rather than react, with the former being more thought out and less impulsive than the latter. Social awareness is reading the room, but doing so through empathy, or understanding others’ emotions. Empathy was one of our main focuses in this session, and we talked about the importance of it in the workplace. Finally, Relationship Management means that you have the ability to impact others. Coaching, mentoring, or resolving conflict are examples that the article provided, and this is really just putting EQ to use to actually be effective.
Overall, I felt it was valuable to speak on each of these areas because EQ gets talked about so little. Alejandro helped us to understand these concepts, but then also provided us with daily
journal entries based around each side of EQ, which allowed us to go past simply understanding and put the ideas to work. Gaining an understanding of our own potential for growth within emotional intelligence will benefit us all in our future personal and work
relationships. My classmates and I are super thankful for Alejandro and the time spent with us. We all learned a lot. The program in general was a great experience.
