The following is a guest article by Catherine Ahern, Web editor of Briefings Media Group.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, understand and manage your own emotions as well as those of the people you interact with. As you might imagine, it’s a skill that can save you from a lot of frustration and heartache in the workplace. But you may not realize that developing your emotional intelligence can also make you more efficient at work. Why? You won’t waste valuable minutes, hours and days with these common time drains:

• Losing your cool. Blowing up at your people rarely—if ever—makes them more productive. In fact, your outbursts probably distract them from their work. Plus, in the long run, those outbursts cost you even more time in apologizing and earning back your staff’s trust and respect. Developing your emotional intelligence will allow you to feel in control of your own emotions.

• Fixing others’ mistakes. When employees aren’t motivated, they make errors and miss deadlines. Increasing your emotional intelligence will help you to understand what really motivates your staff and get them back on track so you don’t have to clean up their messes.

• Mediating conflict. You will minimize the amount of time you spend dealing with your team members’ conflicts if you recognize and stop those conflicts while they’re still brewing.

• Dealing with angry customers and clients. Understanding how a policy, comment or email will affect people emotionally will inform your big decisions. That will save you time that you’d otherwise be using to backtrack, put out fires or—worst of all—respond to lawsuits.

Of all the traits we associate with successful people—intelligence, toughness, determination, vision and so on—emotional intelligence is the strongest determining factor of leadership success, both with individuals and throughout organizations. The brand-new Emotional Intelligence Training Camp led by expert Chuck Wolfe will give your organization’s leaders the soft skills they most need to be effective.

Sign up today for the upcoming session in Boston on Sept. 10-11. Hurry! Space is limited!