An Emotional Intelligence Approach to Developing Your Leadership Style

“You have to find your signature.”

~ Frank Gehry

Good leadership is like good architecture. At its best, it requires doing things in a way that will have a lasting impact based on your signature leadership values.

To be sure, good leaders need to master the more common tools of leadership. To grow as a leader, you need to learn how to be strategic and inspirational, manage deadlines, resolve conflict, balance stakeholders, and foster collaboration and engagement. The more tools you have in your leadership toolkit, the more effective you’ll be as a leader. Still, when you use those tools in the service of larger, enduring human values, you begin to create a leadership style that will create a legacy.

That’s because how people feel about their work is what people really care about. If they feel trusted, recognized, understand their part in building something they believe in, they will come every day with a can-do attitude and get amazing things done. When people feel stressed at work, whether it’s because their boss is unpredictable or there are power struggles, territorialism, and infighting, they become distracted and unproductive, more focused on surviving another day than contributing to a common goal. When they go home at night, they are either energized by what they have accomplished or depleted by the stress.

It’s a leader’s job to create the conditions for engagement and inspiration in an office, which requires being attuned to how people feel. Keeping tabs on how everyone is feeling is not easy work even when conditions are stable and ideal. Of course, conditions are almost never ideal, and now with a Pandemic, unprecedented challenges have become the norm.

Even as the world shifts, values rooted in empathy, compassion, and dedication to a purpose remain stable, like a north star, helping us navigate whatever comes along. In the midst of the most unexpected curveball, leaders who are grounded in values are able to calmly pause, gather the information needed, and make a decision that their teams and stakeholders understand and support. The confidence needed to stand by and make difficult decisions, and get others to buy-in, comes from knowing they are in tune with their values.

Strong leaders use values to guide them, leading them toward what matters to their employees and customers alike. Every leader has to find the beliefs that, like their signature, define who they are and create a signature leadership style. When the leader’s values align with the company values, and the company values align with the customer values, extraordinary success can follow.

Leaders with Signature Leadership Styles

Just as no two industries are alike, no two leadership value sets are alike. Leaders in the arts and cutting edge technology need to be guided by a certain amount of boldness and innovation. Leaders in health need to be guided by dedication to the scientific method. Leaders in finance need to be guided by growth and security. In every industry, leaders need to share the values of their target customers.

Here are a few well known examples of leaders whose values aligned their company mission with their target audience in ways that led them to the top of their industries.

Louis B. Mayer became like a father-figure to many in the studio system in the early days of MGM. He believed in apple-pie values like family, America, and God. During the middle of the 20th century, he made movies that spoke to a generation of Americans who fought and died for the same values.

James E. Burke, the CEO of Johnson and Johnson during the Tylenol arsenic poisoning episode, believed in putting customer health first, above all interests including the company’s. His belief in transparency and openness guided the decisions that would make Tylenol one of the most trusted brands in America in spite of the attack.

Mickey Drexler made first Gap and then J. Crew mega-successful by his ability to use sales data to spot a trend. He knew that being on trend was important to his customers and he made it the center of his retail strategy. When he saw something starting to sell, he doubled down quickly, and was able to catch consumer taste when it was peaking in one style or another.

Steven Sample became head of USC in 1991 when it was a regional school. He recognized that it had the elements to make it a great national school—great faculty, great sports, and great facilities. What it lacked was great students. So, he set about improving the student body. Admissions had to work every angle to admit and enroll kids who had great test scores. The faculty was given what it needed to do cutting edge research and bring students to new discoveries. Even members of the sports teams had to come up academically. Within ten years, he turned a nice second tier school into a great, first-rate university by any measure guided by his dedication to a better student body.

What all these leaders had in common was a signature leadership style, a set of values that guided decisions about where to invest for the future, how to decide when interests competed or conflicted, who to inspire to realize their grand visions. They all had leadership tools—ability to listen, empathy, curiosity, ambitious dreams and goals, and understood how to put together a team of people whose skills complemented and added to each other. But the signature values were what set them apart and elevated their results.

Leadership Values Need to Match the Emotional Needs of the Team

Emotional intelligence values help performance in the day-to-day middle ranks of management where most people work. Even if you are a first-time manager or leading a small team, you will get better results if you can develop your leadership toolbox around signature values that meet the emotional needs of your team.

Lasting values that will guide you need to be based in emotional intelligence. If you support your team emotionally, you free them up to be productive and engaged for high performance. If you ignore their emotional needs, territorialism, power struggles, and undermining will become significant distractions and lead to burn-out or turn over. If you’re really attuned to what’s going on, you can step in before bad things happen and get good outcomes even in the worst of circumstances.

One of my clients came to me as a subject matter expert in biotech. She had risen out of the ranks of individual contributors because she was simply good at managing a large number of variables and identifying the most promising lines of scientific inquiry. As she became a manager, she started to realize that with people, unlike in science, there is not always a right answer.

Instead of focusing on answers and outcomes, she began to focus on coaching her team to focus on productivity and outcomes. She developed a set of five core values that she relied on for her leadership style to help her team reach high performance metrics:

  1. Everyone deserves to feel heard.
  2. Everyone is responsible for being honest and sharing knowledge that will support the team.
  3. When problems arise, it’s the leader’s job to empathize and understand people’s problems and believe in their ability to solve them.
  4. No one member’s needs or desires are above the team’s success.
  5. When things do not go as planned or when people act in disruptive ways, don’t take it personally. Take ego out of it and prioritize the needs of the company and the team.

She used these values to guide her as she built a high performing team. By prioritizing knowledge sharing, she reduced redundancy and duplication of work and also encouraged learning by the team. By being empathetic, she found ways to keep team members engaged in scientific work even during the pandemic as they performed essential COVID research, making sure each team member had the conditions they needed to feel safe and focus. When one employee blamed others for unmet performance goals, she found ways to hold him clearly accountable and protect others from unfounded accusations. In every case, her values helped her decide how to respond even in the most difficult situations. After a year, she was rewarded with a promotion into higher manager ranks.

Put Emotional Intelligence at the Core of Your Signature Leadership Style

Good leaders recognize that the company is its people, and that the company’s success will come from the employee’s success. That’s why emotional intelligence is at the heart of every great leader’s values. Whether it’s connecting to customer and employees dreams and desires or appealing to the employee’s and public’s need to trust and believe in their products, the leader’s connection to the emotional core of stakeholders will guide them to greater success.