INTRODUCTION:

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions, and those of the people around. People with a high degree of emotional intelligence know what they’re feeling, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can affect other people.
OR
Emotional Intelligence is the quality that enables us to confront with patience, insight and imagination the many problems that we face in our affective relationships with ourselves and with other people.

COMPONENTS OF EI

(Daniel Goleman – the most widely accepted and used model for EI)
1. Self-awareness: the ability to recognize a feeling as it happens. Self awareness is clarity about our feelings and thoughts. With awareness comes the ability to make better choices.

2. Self-Management: Handling our own emotions so that they don’t interfere but facilitate: having the ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal; recovering well from emotional distress: translating our deepest, truest preferences into action in order to improve and succeed.

3. Social Awareness: Sensing what others are feeling; being able to understand situations from others’ perspective: cultivating relationships with a diverse range of people.

4. Social Skills: Handling emotions in respect to relationships with other people; able to read the intricacies of social interactions: able to interact in social situations well; able to use this skill set to influence, persuade, negotiate, and lead.

A civil servant as an administrator has the responsibility to act as the   vanguard of society. In this context, utilization of emotional intelligence skills can assist him/her in the attainment of this goal and enhance the  quality of decision-making, deal with complex situations effectively.

Application of EI in administration
1. EI enables a leader to be conscious of personal limitations and use  personal strengths to further the work of achieving organizational goals.

2. It allows mental clarity that leadership demands for taking right decisions and deal with conflicting situations rationally.

3. It helps in developing healthy working relationships by better understanding the strengths and weaknesses of co-workers and maintaining a healthy rapport with people. An empathetic individual can read emotional currents, picking up on nonverbal cues such as tone of voice or facial expression, thereby better understanding the needs and demands of other people and acting accordingly.

4.  It helps an administrator to persuade, convince, or impact others in order to get them to support a specific agenda or course of action.

Our technical intelligence is great but a wiser, saner future for the human race depends on the capacity to master its own emotions. In present times, especially in a market driven economy, governance will become increasingly complex. Ensuring the rights of citizens and respect for all individuals in a democracy while simultaneously maintaining law and order becomes a challenge. Hence, use of emotional intelligence is a must for better public service delivery as well as redressal.