Great leaders are also good with their emotional intelligence

Recently we all have started to come across the term “Emotional Intelligence” in our everyday life. In this proactive psychological era, we all are aware of the importance of psychology and emotional intelligence or EI is part of positive psychology.

As per organizational psychology, emotional intelligence of leaders plays a valuable role in every organization. Before moving ahead, lets put some light on what emotional intelligence is, indeed.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

We are filled with different emotions every day and whatever we are doing, emotions are involved in it. Whether any decision, judgments or any action. Emotional Intelligence is your potential to recognize your emotions as well as the emotions of others, able to make a clear difference between them and be able to tag different emotions correctly.

Once done with the evaluation process of emotions, use this emotional information to navigate your thinking and actions¹. Put it in another word, manage your emotions rather than being managed by them².

Well, all this really need a good enough time to learn if you are looking for the long run and sustainable success.

Why a leader should be emotionally intelligent?

According to Daniel Goleman, the pioneering psychologist in EI research, effective leaders have a high degree of emotional intelligence. Leadership skills comprise good intelligent quotient, understanding of technical skills and high emotional intelligence. However, technical skills and IQ are the threshold potential which requires at the entry-level for the executive position³. Surely, it does not mean that cognitive skills are less important. It points out emotional skills are twice as important as other skills at all job levels, especially at the leadership level.

4 key skills and subskills of EI

Goleman and Richard E. Boyatzis model of EI.⁴

This EI model has been designed to fit in the organizational conditions. According to Goleman, Self-awareness is the first component of EI. In other words, EI starts with your level self-awareness. Along with self-awareness, other mentioned components are also equally important.

#1. Self-awareness

• Emotional self-awareness– Identify your emotions and understand its impacts. Also, knowing your strengths and weakness.
• Self-assessment– Leaders with high self-awareness aware of their limitations and strengths. Also, they accept feedback and constructive criticism and learn to improve where they need to be. Self-assessment helps the leader to understand when to ask for help and where to focus in order to cultivate new leadership strengths.

#2. Self-management

• Emotional self-control– keeping troublesome emotions under control
• Adaptability– Flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.
• Achievement orientation– An aspiration to improve performance to meet the standard of excellence.
• Positive outlook– Sensible optimism perspective while pursuing personal and organizational goals.

#3. Social awareness

• Empathy– identifying others emotions, understanding their perspective and taking an active interest in their concerns.
• Organizational awareness– Understanding the political forces as well as guiding values and unspoken rules which operate among people.

#4. Relationship management

• Influence– Command over the effective strategies for persuasion.
• Coach and mentor– strengthening others abilities through feedback and guiding people.
• Conflict management– resolving disagreements, understand a different perspective and find a common solution that everyone can endorse.
• Teamwork– synergize group, cooperation and team building. spend time to build a close relationship beyond work obligations.
• Inspirational leadership– Guiding and motivating with an attractive vision. To articulate a shared mission in a way to inspire others to follow. Offers a sense of common purpose.

In order to make an evaluation of your EI level, analyse your emotions on the given model of EI. Similarly, put yourself in the given emotional model to have closer analysis. For instance, imagine yourself in conflict and see how you can manage it.

In addition, to the above assessment techniques, find below a link to questions for better assessment.

So, in conclusion, we can become more aware of our EI level and can even learn to ehance it.

Footnotes:

1. Goleman, Mayer and Salovey.
2. Book- Emotional Intelligence Coaching by Stephen Neale.
3. Goleman
4. Book- Primal Leadership.