Emotional Intelligence: Key to Effective Leadership
1. Introduction
The belief that there are individuals with the “right stuff” to be leaders is more art than science. After all, the personal styles of superb leaders vary. And just as important, different situations call for different types of leadership. Most mergers need a sensitive negotiator at the helm, whereas many turnarounds require a more forceful authority.
The most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence.
2. Evaluating Emotional Intelligence
Most large companies today have employed trained psychologists to develop what are known as “competency models” to aid them in identifying, training, and promoting likely stars in the leadership firmament. The psychologists have also developed such models for lower-level positions.
Three capability categories:
- Purely technical skills like accounting and business planning
- Cognitive abilities like analytical reasoning
- Competencies demonstrating emotional intelligence, such as the ability to work with others and effectiveness in leading change.
To create some of the competency models, psychologists asked senior managers to identify capabilities that typified the organization’s most outstanding leaders. To create other models, the psychologists used objective criteria, such as a division’s profitability, to differentiate the star performers at senior levels within the organizations from the average ones. Those individuals were then extensively interviewed and tested, and their capabilities were compared.
This process resulted in the creation of lists of ingredients for highly effective leaders. Some analysis showed that emotional intelligence played an increasingly important role at the highest levels of the company, where differences in technical skills are of negligible importance. In other words, the higher the rank of a person considered to be a star performer, the more emotional intelligence capabilities showed up as the reason for their effectiveness.
What distinguishes great leaders from merely good ones? It isn’t IQ or technical skills; it is emotional intelligence – a group of five skills that enable the best leaders to maximize their own and their followers’ performance.
High potential: Is typically someone who has been identified as possessing the potential to move eventually into a senior leadership position in the organization. As noted in recent surveys, less than half of the organizations actually had a program to accelerate the development of high-potential leaders.
Evaluation: It is considered a hallmark of an effective development initiative, efforts to evaluate the results of such initiatives are often forgotten or ignored. Unfortunately, most of the evaluation efforts are focused on participants’ reactions to the developmental program, with little attention to understanding whether the leader’s developmental experience had an impact on their behavior or the organization.
3. What Makes a Leader
Conclusion
To conclude, the process is inherently dynamic and eclectic, so it makes sense to build theoretical frameworks that reflect these features.