Emotional Intelligence Leadership

Leaders should be willing and able to show their emotions when appropriate. It’s ‘when is it appropriate and how to express those emotions’ that we don’t all agree on.

There were two tragic car accidents this week that touched my world. The two that lost their lives still had so much living ahead. Their contribution to making life better will really be missed.

In the shock of reading an email in the first case and hearing the news in the second, I had to decide how to respond.

Writing a response via email was just too impersonal. Phoning seemed the right thing to do in both cases. With caller ID, the person on the other end could choose not to answer. They answered. Tears, a loss of words, then words overflowing were shared.

Perhaps this is not what another leader might have chosen to do. In these two situations, it felt right to me. I hope that my reaching out and sharing my sense of loss and compassion will in some small way lead to healing.

Leaders need to know themselves well enough to know what they are willing and able to do in times of loss. And I believe leaders also need to be willing and able to be vulnerable in those situations to share their emotions, their compassion and humanity.

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Don’t let your emotions get in the way of your leadership or bottom line business results will suffer.

A business owner, my client, was mad. He felt disrespected by an employee. He knew he had to address the behavior, because if he didn’t, his silence would condone what the employee did and in the end it would negatively affect business.

This leader knows that what he permits, he promotes.

First thing first. He had to get control of his emotions. By self managing, he could he maintain his leadership based on integrity and set a good example. We all get mad, upset, frustrated. How you manage those emotions impacts your leadership.  Calm down and focus. That’s what he did. Then he had to get all the facts (there was evidence of wrong doing, but more facts were needed) and then determine next steps on how to discuss the inappropriate behavior with the employee.

Don’t let you emotions get in the way of your leadership. And be clear on what you permit because that is what you promote.

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Yesterday I heard part of an interview on Smart City Radio with Larry Beasley founder of Beasley and Associates, an international planning consultancy.  Larry talked about planning cities based around an emotional response…love.

He is advocating that love is the key force to building great cities (and suburbs), suggesting that we need to tap into people’s emotions and what they want, what will make them happy. If we do this, people will invest back into the city and that will feed the economy. He calls it experiential planning.

This piqued my interest from a leadership perspective as we look at community, what that means and how each of us can contribute. Larry says  it’s as easy as coming together and starting a discussion about one street, one park and it’s design. Creating an environment that we enjoy being in and part of shifts our attitude about it and then the image of our city shifts as people identify their city as very livable, happiness increases. That is what differentiates cities – those that are vibrant draw and create wealth vs. those that simply exist.

Larry points to going beyond the basic economic development model and look to include right from the start, fundamental beauty – the things that evoke a strong positive emotion. A complete vision for what we want, combined with experiential planning and involvement create smart cities.

He urges that we be brave – to step beyond the limitations, safety and security that exist now. This is leadership.

Go to http://www.smartcityradio.com/show/2605/All-for-Good to hear the whole interview.

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There are a number of things these days that might keep you from having a good night’s sleep. I’m sure you have your own list or could easily come up with one.

Something happened to a friend recently that hit me squarely in the gut. I found out that this friend and her child had their lives turned upside down by domestic violence and were homeless for a time. I was shocked. I didn’t know what to think.  Being sensitive to the fairly common gap between intention and impact, I acted. I reached out as best I could given the sketchy details and was about to offer them a place to stay when she  explained they are now in a program for families in their situation. She and her child are OK for now.

In the space of about two hours, my emotions ran the range. I also realized that there are parts of my life that have been very sheltered. This got me thinking about personal leadership and everything that goes into that, how that influences how we show up, what actions we do or do not take, what lens we see the wordl through and what keeps leaders up at night.

It made me reflect on what is important vs. what is urgent vs. what gets in the way by our own doing or external circumstances. And it was a timely reminder that though there are many things that we say are important, we better do a personal check-in to make sure we are on track. On track with what is aligned with our own personal leadership. In fact, a daily self-check-in can do wonders for  our personal leadership and integrity,  which in turn affects business results and what keeps us up at night.

What keeps YOU up at night?

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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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