Enhance Your Leadership with Emotional Intelligence

There’s much more to great leadership than simply ‘being clever’. While IQ (intelligence quotient) will take you a long way, the true qualities that really distinguish whether or not you’ll lead others effectively relate to your emotional intelligence.

What is emotional intelligence – and how does it enhance leadership?

The US psychologist Daniel Goleman popularised the term emotional intelligence in 1995.

He describes it as: ‘The capacity for recognising our own feelings, and those of others, for motivating ourselves and managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.’

His research suggests that as much as 60% of your success as a leader is attributable to your emotional intelligence. For example, consider the following key qualities unanimously revered in organisations:

• Communication skills (the ability to listen, converse and present)
• Adaptability (the ability to deal with ambiguity and overcome setbacks and obstacles)
• Personal effectiveness (pride, a desire to develop and the motivation to work)
• Interpersonal skills (the ability to work with others)

All of these involve emotional intelligence. They have a direct impact on the way you act – but crucially they have a big impact on how others around you act too.

An emotionally-intelligent leader is someone who already has these qualities. But they will also have five further abilities, namely self-awareness, self-confidence, self-control, empathy and the ability (and willingness) to listen.

By developing your emotional intelligence, you can improve your own personal performance – but you can also improve the performance of your team as well. Further research shows that approximately 30% of an organisation’s financial performance can be traced to the climate that the leader creates – making it clear that if a leader develops their emotional intelligence, it can have a positive impact on the performance of their entire organisation.

How to develop your EI

Emotional intelligence has five realms. To develop your EI, you have to understand your strengths and weaknesses in each of these areas:

1. Self awareness

• The ability to understand your own emotions
• The ability to respect and accept yourself (self regard, self esteem)
• The ability to express feelings, beliefs and thoughts assertively not aggressively
• Being self-directed and emotionally independent
• Motivated to fulfil your own potential and do what you want to do

Remember, you can only change something if you know it needs changing. That’s why raising awareness is the first step. The more you know about yourself, the more you’re able to appreciate what needs to change.

2. Self management

• The ability to withstand adverse events
• To cope with stress
• To control your emotional response, your desire to act or your impulse to speak

3. People skills

• The ability to understand and appreciate the feelings of others
• Having the willingness to contribute to a group in preference to your personal desires
• The ability to develop and sustain mutually-satisfying relationships with a degree of emotional openness
• Sensing what others are thinking and feeling and what is important to them

In organisations, relationship building is a key skill. It is important to be attentive and to ‘emotionally read’ other people, and to give them due consideration.

4. Problem solving and conflict resolution –

• Being flexible and adaptable to changing situations and circumstances;
• Being able to identify problems and come up with potentially effective solutions;
• Being able to see what is really going on (reality testing) and seeking evidence to support your emotional feelings.

It is important to differentiate between what is experienced (subjective) and what really exists (objective).

5. General mood

• The ability to remain optimistic and to retain belief in your own capability;
• To feel satisfied with life, able to enjoy yourself and others and to be enthusiastic.

Bear in mind that emotionally-intelligent leadership is also about how you make people feel. As the American poet Maya Angelou said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, and people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Using EI to improve team performance

Gaining a better understanding of emotional intelligence can help you to become more aware of the strengths of each member of your team – and the challenges they are facing. If you can understand and manage your emotions, and the emotions in others, you can take action in such a way that the impact on other people is positive. This leads to performance improvement.

The way you ‘are’ at work will have an influence on your team. This is because the ‘mood’ of the leader impacts on the people around them, either positively or negatively, and this has a domino effect on business performance.

So ask yourself: what impact am I having on other people?

Having the right impact on others is the true essence of leadership. There’s a North American Indian saying: If you think you’re leading and no-one is following, then you’re just going for a walk!

We can all develop our emotional intelligence because it relates to behaviours that we can influence. If there is a tension between who you are and who you want to be, you might be motivated to change your leadership behaviour.

Enhancing your emotional intelligence is certainly a step in the right direction. Don’t be surprised if you see a significant and positive improvement in your own performance – and in that of your team and your organisation too.

Further resources

If you are interested in learning more about emotional intelligence, we recommend:

• What Makes a Leader? Daniel Goleman – Harvard Business Review January 2004
• Leadership That Gets Results Daniel Goleman – Harvard Business Review March 2000

 

About Cote Consultants

Cote Consultants is a coaching, leadership and performance improvement firm based in central London. We work with any organisation that wants to drive sustainable growth in performance and capital through the personal and professional development of its most promising leaders and teams.

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Posted in: Leadership