Emotional Intelligence in Business Leaders

"In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels"

- Daniel Goleman

Long gone are the days where a once popular top-down approach to leadership, such as the autocratic style covered in our other previous blog “What sort of Leader are you?”, bringing you the best results and the highest engagement.

Popularised by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why can It matter more than IQ in 1996, emotional intelligence is said to provide a person with a heightened ability to understand and regulate both their emotions and the emotions of others. This makes it a vital aspect of being a good leader in this day and age and could be an area in which YOU are lacking.

With the employment market being so competitive and therefore the need for employee retention being so crucial, being a leader is no longer about making your employees work for you but about understanding and interacting with your employees to make them want to work for you and enjoy their jobs. Employees that are happy and engaged in their work have been shown to produce a higher turnover for the business that they work for and according to a study by Gallup, this can be as high as 18% in high-turnover businesses and even up to 43% in lower-turnover businesses! This success can all come from YOU as a leader simply improving areas of emotional intelligence that you are lacking.

Signs of Good Emotional Intelligence Within Business Leaders

The goal of good emotional intelligence within leadership is to connect with your employees on a more personal level, so what are some signs of good emotional intelligence that you can utilise as a leader?

Self-awareness:

Self-awareness can be a hard concept for many people to grasp as it not only makes you aware of your strengths but also your weaknesses. This is important because it can bring to light things that may be holding you back and allows them to be fixed or to be worked around. Further, knowing how the actions that you make will affect others and how you are perceived by your employees allows a leader to make decisions that will not just work for them but also their team to promote the highest productivity achievable.

Self-regulation:

Self-regulation and accountability often go hand in hand. Good self-regulation will allow you as a leader to handle and control your emotions and prevent involuntary outbursts. Without good self-regulation, a hostile and un-motivational work environment can arise and also the respect in leadership can be weakened.

Motivation:

If a leader has good emotional intelligence, then it allows them to understand their employees and more importantly what motivates them. A good knowledge on what motivates your employees provides you with ways to incentivise workers in turn leading to a productive workplace which makes effective motivation mutually advantageous.

Empathy:

Empathy allows a leader to see situations from the point of view of their employees and acknowledge their problems and struggles. Once you as a leader can see the problems that your employees are having you are then in a superior position to act on these problems to ease the burden on your employees. These actions won’t go unnoticed by your team and will subsequently pave the way to promoting increased levels of trust between you and your employees that will only be beneficial to both parties.

Social Skills:

If a leader has good social skills, then they can be seen as easy to communicate with. This then allows you to break the cliché that your leader is your superior and nothing more. One of the main actions that stems from good communication is the humanisation of you as a “Boss” which helps to even the playing field when it comes to the power dynamic within the workplace and encourage mutual respect.

How to Take Action

After reading this blog, take a step back and evaluate if you lack any of these valuable qualities of high emotional intelligence leaders because just like IQ, these can be improved and these small improvements could make a big difference when answering the age old question that every high up should be asking themselves.

How Can i Become a Better Leader?

Now to leave you with something to reflect on. Emotional intelligence can have a ripple effect throughout your entire organisation. The work environment a leader that can sense the emotional needs of their employees and react to that information to improve their work lives creates, fosters an environment that encourages employees to enjoy their jobs and take pride in their work. This employee engagement is something which even the highest IQ cannot grant you. They have to go hand in hand.

References: 

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236366/right-culture-not-employee-satisfaction.aspx