Emotional Intelligence Leadership

I work with very smart leaders. Many are at the top of their organization. They are great at getting business results. Most are still refining how to get even better results through those that work with them.

And yet only a handful really know themselves and have a high level of self awareness.

Leadership Principle One is Know Yourself. You must connect with yourself on the fundamentals before you can do that with others effectively. You  must be a student of yourself to be an effective leader. And if you hope to get better results through those that you work with, you need to nurture your emotional intelligence and become an emotionally intelligent leader.

Know yourself, re-connect with yourself by reflecting on and answering these simple self assessment questions:

-What ten characteristics/qualities distinguish you, make you stand out?

-What are your top five values and how do those show up in your life? How do your top values influence what you do and how you do it?

-How emotionally intelligent are you? Daniel Goleman defines Emotional Intelligence as: …the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.  See www.haygroup.com/tl/EI/Quiz.aspx for a mini EI self assessment.

When you have a clearer understanding of yourself, use that information to help you make better future choices and decisions. That may include reviewing past decisions and doing a post mortem, asking a mentor for his/her input and engaging in leadership coaching.

Stay tuned for more on knowing yourself.

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Everyone agrees that as a leader, part of your job is to improve business results. Uh huh. Well, this is why you have to be emotionally intelligent: Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and co author of Primal Leadership with Richard Boyatzis and Annie Mckee found that an affiliative leadership style which builds emotional capital is more effective in today’s organizations than the leadership styles of yesterday. The data reviwed by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee suggest that HOW a leader leads is key…to the bottom line. The numbers point to a leader’s style being about 70% of the emotional climate and climate is in large part the reason why people stay at a company. A good emotional climate makes employees feel good to be a part of that entity. Emotional climate then drives about 20%, sometimes more, of business performance.

How does emotional climate come to be? As noted, a leader’s style and how s/he makes you feel creates the emotional tone of the workplace. There are four fundamentals of what is known as emotional intelligence that enable a leader to create a great emotional climate. They are: self- awareness, self-management (self-management of emotion), social awareness (empathy), and relationship management. Each of these components is inter-related and we’ll be talking more about these in future posts. But for now, it all starts with self-awareness.

By a certain point in life, we tend to think that we know ourselves pretty well. Perhaps. Then again maybe not. Or maybe in certain ways, but not in the realm of our emotions. There are three key competencies to being self-aware according to Hay Group’s Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI): emotional self-awareness, accurate self-assessment, and self-confidence.

• Do you know the signs that tell you what you are feeling?

• Do you use that information to help you shift your focus if needed?

• Do you have strong sense of your capabilities? Of your shortcomings?

• Are you open to feedback and do you solicit it regularly?

While it’s tempting to answer “yes” to these questions and conclude that you are in fact emotionally intelligent, it turns out that there’s a range of emotional intelligence. And, perhaps more importantly, emotional intelligence, like leadership, can be developed.

Take action on becoming more emotionally self-aware: the next time you are working, notice how you are feeling. Happy, frustrated, calm, energized? Then, see how that impacts what you’re working on. Are you productive, creative, efficient? Is everything flowing easily? Or are you slogging through it just to get it checked-off the list? Are you doing C+ work? Check-in with yourself . Note what emotions and patterns of emotions cause you to be at your best.

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