Emotional intelligence: The key to being a successful leader
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What makes a stellar individual contributor does not sustain a good manager
Managers are often promoted to their leadership positions due to demonstrated experience and expertise in delivering high quality products and services as individual contributors. Contrary to what distinguishes team members, the best predictor of success as a manager is a person’s ability to recognize their own and other’s emotions, and the impact of those emotions on the workplace.
According to a landmark study by Dr. Christina Boedker of 5,600 people in 77 organizations, “the ability of a leader to be empathetic and compassionate has the greatest impact on organizational profitability and productivity.”
What is emotional intelligence?
The ability to mindfully acknowledge, discern, label, and manage different emotions, regardless of whether they originated internally or externally, and the use of that information to guide decision making and subsequent behavior is known as emotionally intelligence.
Emotionally intelligence was first coined by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer (not the singer) in 1990, and popularized through a series of books by Daniel Goleman, beginning with Emotional Intelligence in 1995. Psychologist Steven Stein furthered this field of research and demonstrated that emotionally intelligent leaders are more effective in communicating and creating environments where team members feel valued and validated, which contribute to greater workplace morale, higher productivity, and better long-term health of the organization as a whole.
Elements of emotional intelligence
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According to Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence is associated with five key elements:
Self awareness: Recognize and understand our own emotions and reactions
Self management: Manage, control, and adapt our emotions, mood, reactions, and responses
Motivation: Harness our emotions to motivate ourselves to take appropriate action, commit, follow-through, and work toward the achievement of our goals
Empathy: Discern the feelings of others, understand their emotions, and utilize that understanding to relate to others more effectively
Social skills: Build relationships, relate to others in social situations, lead, negotiate conflict, and work as part of a team
How can emotional intelligence help leaders?
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Leaders who display and nurture high emotional intelligence become better leaders. Here are a sampling of benefits:
Internal awareness: Making sound decisions requires an understanding of how your feelings are affecting perceptions, judgment, and productivity. The best leaders are self-aware of not only their emotions, but also their weaknesses and limitations, in addition to strengths. For example, a manager who isn’t a good delegator but is self-aware about that shortcoming can make a conscious effort to delegate out tasks more and trust the people those tasks have been assigned to. Internal awareness isn’t eliminating emotions from decisions, but rather allowing them to work with rationality so they don’t subconsciously affect judgment.
Self-regulation: Leaders who make impulsive decisions or fail to control their emotions and lash out can quickly lose the respect of their direct reports. Those unregulated moments can undo any rapport you’ve built. Emotional intelligence cultivates self-regulation and prevents the onset of moments you wish you could take back.
Increased empathy: People with high emotional intelligence have a good understanding of their own emotional states, which allows them to more accurately gauge the emotions of others. For leaders, this empathy places them in their employees’ shoes, thus leading to more thoughtful and deliberate decisions.
Collaborative communication: Because they understand their coworkers, emotionally intelligent leaders can immediately pick up the tone of the room or group and subsequently speak with honesty and sincerity to match that tone or mitigate unresolved tension.
Less stress: Workplace stress may be unavoidable, but leaders with emotional intelligence manage it better and don’t let it consume them. They also refuse to take any negative feelings out on their coworkers or families. These leaders tend to enjoy better work/life balance, knowing that the emotions of work need to stay at work (and vice versa).
How can emotional intelligence help organizations?
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Plenty of organizations with a seemingly endless supply of technical know-how and years of experience continue to struggle because they lack emotional intelligence. These organizations also encounter difficulty preventing employee turnover. Alternatively, companies with high emotional intelligence enjoy many advantages, including:
Better team engagement: Teams that feel a negative attachment — or no attachment at all — to team leaders or their teammates disengage and, therefore, fail to capitalize on the inherent benefits of working as a team. Emotional intelligence acknowledges the team dynamic and gives everyone a voice.
Improved company culture: Organizations often talk about how great their company culture is, but without emotional intelligence, what you think your culture is might differ from what your employees actually feel. Leaders with emotional intelligence encourage stronger relationships and open communication, which moves you closer to the culture the company likely wants to achieve.
High performance-driven results: Trusted employees, whose emotions are valued and who aren’t subjected the negative, unfiltered emotions of their superiors, simply perform better — and more productivity ultimately improves the bottom line.
Taking the first step in building emotional intelligence
Cultivating emotional intelligence begins with regular practice of mindfulness skills. Leverage the powers of the desktop app Quimby to improve emotional intelligence and keep a pulse on your team morale.
Learn more about concrete actions in building emotional intelligence by reading Part II of this article.
