Effective leaders need emotional intelligence.
It’s a myth to assume that hiring for technical prowess and intellectual horsepower will result in effective leaders. Smart people fail all the time. In fact, people who have to be the smartest people in the room often create a lot of trouble. Technical skills only go so far. People who just keep their head down and churn out work are useful in individual contributor roles, but they don’t make good leaders.
Of course you want smart people with good skills, but they need emotional intelligence if they are going to lead teams effectively. The research is clear: Emotional intelligence accounts for 90% of leadership success and is the number one predictor for leadership effectiveness.
Effective leaders get work done through other people. They create psychological safety, support and empathize with team members to inspire and motivate people to do their best and work hard to achieving common goals.
The problem is that most people are never taught leadership skills. Often, as soon as they are in a leadership role, they unconsciously mimic what their parents did or what they observed in their first job, implementing a traditional command-and-control style of leadership. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work today and research shows, it never worked.
Emotional intelligence is Essential to Getting Results
There are five emotional intelligence competencies that consistently show up in effective leaders.
- Self-Regard: Accepting yourself fully, related to self-confidence but bigger. If you accept yourself fully–your strengths, your weaknesses, and everything in between–you can avoid getting triggered in stressful situations. Rather than reacting, you will be able to remain calm and address the situation.
- Emotional Self-Awareness: Knowing what you are feeling and why. Knowing what other people are feeling and why. This key skill gives you the ability to respond to and even predict how people will react to you. It is the foundation for leadership success.
- Emotional Self-Expression: Being able to express yourself non-offensively in situations where emotions are involved. This skill helps you communicate effectively. When others are triggered, an ability to communicate and respond to emotional information can de-escalate conflicts before they boil over.
- Empathy: The basis for human connection and the root of all the other skills that build trust and belonging. When employees feel that someone understands and cares about them as a person, motivation and effort increase significantly.
- Decision making: We don’t often think of decision making as an emotional intelligence skill, but emotions often get in the way of good decisions. When leaders manager their own emotions during the decision making process, they achieve better outcomes.
My training workshops help whole teams learn what emotional intelligence is and how to use it to increase their team’s engagement and results and become more effective leaders. One-on-one coaching is the gold standard for leadership development. In six months of coaching, my clients gain leadership quality emotional intelligence skills and their results improve significantly.