Leadership and
Emotional Intelligence.
Leaders need to manage the mood of their organization. The most gifted leaders accomplish that by using a mysterious blend of psychological abilities known as emotional intelligence. They’re self aware and empathetic. They can read and regulate their own emotions while intuitively grasping how others feel and gauging their organization’s emotional state.
Emotional
Intelligence is partly a function of genetic predisposition, part life experience, and part old fashioned training, emotional intelligence emerges in varying degrees from one
Leader to the next, and managers apply it with varying skill. Wisely and compassionately deployed, emotional intelligence spurs leaders, their people, and their organizations to superior performance; naively and maliciously applied it can paralyze leaders or allow them to manipulate followers for personal gain.
Self awareness is the key emotional intelligence skill behind
good leadership. It’s often thought of as ability to know how you’re feeling and why, and the impact your feelings have on your behavior. But it also involves a capacity to monitor and control those strong but subliminal biases that all of us harbor and that can skew our decision making.
At the same time there has to be caution in using emotional intelligence for if any of these
skills are developed disproportionately, they can interfere with your relationships. If you’re extremely self aware but short on empathy, you might come off as self obsessed. If you‘re excessively sympathetic, you risk being too hard to read. If you’re great at self management but not yet transparent, you might seem inauthentic. Finally at times leaders have to deliberately avoid getting too closer to the troops in order to ensure that they’re seeing the bigger picture. Emotional intelligent leader know when to rein it in.
American history has shown that not only that emotional intelligence is an indispensable ingredient of political
Leadership but also that it can be enhanced through sustained effort. George Washington had to work hard to control his fiery temper before he became a role model for the republic, and Abraham Lincoln had to overcome deep melancholia to display that the brave and the warm countenance that made him a magnet for other.
You can be a good leader if you know the art of getting others to produce superior work. The good news is emotional intelligence can be learnt. Leaders who are motivated to improve their emotional intelligence can do so if they’re given the right information, guidance and support. The information they need is a candid assessment of their strengths and limitations from people who know them well and whose opinions they trust. The guidance they need is a specific developmental plan that uses naturally occurring workplace encounters as the laboratory to talk to as they practice how to handle different situations, what to do when they’ve blown it and how to learn from those setbacks. If leaders cultivate these resources and practice continually they can develop specific emotional intelligence skills – skills that will last for years.
More summaries about the Leadership and Emotional Intelligence