Emotional Intelligence is key to Outstanding Leadership

 

Emotional Intelligence is key to Outstanding Leadership

 

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand your own and others’ emotions and how they drive our behavior, and then using that knowledge to motivate others. 

“Most of us make mistakes around emotional intelligence because they don’t understand what’s going on with other people.  “We don’t even necessarily understand what’s going on with others.” 

A lack of emotional intelligence among the senior team can be devastating to the rest of the workforce and down the line team as well.

If leaders are ineffective, when they set poor examples of how they treat other people, that trickles down throughout the company.” The result could be low employee engagement or high turnover because of the toxic interactions between people. 

On the other hand, leaders with high emotional intelligence “tend to be uplifted by their interactions with people and think it’s great to have a team,”

The good news is you can improve your emotional intelligence, if you’re willing to work at it.

According to Goleman there are 5 emotional intelligence competencies:

1.    Motivation

2.    Self-awareness

3.    Self-regulation

4.    Social skills

5.    Empathy

 

These competencies are critical to being a successful leader, and are demonstrated through leadership behaviors. Think about the very best leader you can – what makes them so good? When we ask participants to do this in our leadership development programs, typical responses include:

• Leaders lead by example, inspiring, not afraid of difficult stuff, focused and driven (motivation)
• Leaders are confident, honest, direct, consistent (self-awareness)
• Leaders are clear, decisive, straight forward, intuitive (self-regulation)
• Leaders are good communicators, approachable and listen to others (social skills)
• Leaders are empathetic, influential (empathy)

Successful leadership is about being effective in three ways:

Leading self - Successful leaders know that they are not perfect. They are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and strive for continuous improvement.

Leading others - Leaders know that they need other people – after all, leadership doesn’t mean a lot without followership. Being personally motivated isn’t enough – leaders need to unlock the potential of others.

Leading the organization - Successful leaders know how to inspire others. Leadership means being visionary, keeping in mind at all times the bigger picture. Leaders can articulate that big picture to others – and the best leaders help people to see their role in that big picture. They also hold themselves and their organization accountable to that goal.

 

To develop your leadership skills, you don’t need to be a robot and turn your emotions off, but rather to focus on interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. Being an effective leader is about technical skill, strategic thinking and knowledge. Being a great leader also requires emotional intelligence.

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