I think often about the difference between "good" leadership and "great" leadership. I think I've boiled them down to two very simple concepts.
To be a good leader is to guide your team to success.
To be a great leader is to inspire passion in your team, forging strong connections and fostering a positive work environment that sees all team members achieving their highest potential.
Leadership is not just about guiding a team to achieve goals; it’s also about connecting with people, understanding their needs, and fostering a positive work environment. A great leader can effectively communicate and create a strong sense of belonging among their teams, and this requires not only skills in planning, delegation, and execution, but also a powerful command of emotions, empathy, and ability to navigate social relationships.
Teams, naturally, are made up of people, and every person's life is reflected in their day-to-day tasks to some degree. Leading a team means to see the human being behind every team member's work, and to maintain awareness of not only their emotions, but our own feelings, as well.
This may sound daunting at first, but the secret is something that comes naturally to many of us -- strong emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a crucial role in effective leadership, enabling leaders to manage their emotions, understand others, and build stronger relationships. Effective emotional intelligence skills feed in to other key components of leadership, including conflict management, interpersonal skills, stress management, and inspiring motivation.
In today's blog post, I want to explore the hidden power of emotional intelligence in creating effective leaders, highlight all the ways we can harness this energy and channel it into building stronger teams, and examine how we can improve our own ability to manage our emotions in high-stress situations.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions effectively and constructively in communication and relating to others. It differs from what we think of as general intelligence (aka your IQ or intelligence quotient) in that it isn't measured on how high you score on a math quiz or how quickly you can decipher a logic problem -- it has to do with your ability to master emotional states and how well you recognize them in yourself and others.
There are four key components of emotional intelligence:
- Self-Awareness: To know oneself is the beginning of all wisdom, but it is equally true when talking about emotional intelligence. How could we even begin to manage the emotions of others if we cannot apply the same logic to ourselves? Recognizing and understanding your own emotions is pivotal to remaining grounded, objective, and effective in your ability to recognize the same emotions in others.
- Self-Management: Beyond recognizing, we should strive to develop effective self-regulation skills for our own emotions, especially during stressful situations. Effectively managing your emotions and behaviors is an important skill to hone, and you may find that you can apply the same tools to managing conflicts among others.
- Social Awareness: The next step is to then apply emotional awareness in our own social relationships, and the relationships among our team members.
- Relationship Management: Finally, emotional intelligence is best put into practice through building and maintaining healthy relationships with effective communication and conflict resolution skills.
Each of these topics could be deserving of their own blog posts, but I want to give a general overview of each component of emotional intelligence, here.
Developing Emotional Intelligence Skills
Building Self-Awareness
Like any great structure, we need to lay a strong foundation -- this is true in both construction and in life. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, involving recognition and understanding of our emotions and how they affect us and others.
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich writes in Harvard Business Review that in her research, she found that organizational leaders tended to display two kinds of self-awareness:
- External self awareness: a conscious awareness of how we come across to our peers, superiors, and subordinates.
- Internal self awareness: the clarity by which we know our internal motivations and values.
In previous blogs, I've talked about the importance of looking internally and reflecting on our values, and internal self awareness is developed in a very similar way.
However, being self aware involves a mix of both of these external and internal types.
The way we develop them is by checking in with ourselves and being open to constructive feedback from others. For instance, perhaps we may believe that we express passion and fervor in our work, but to others, what we see as passion may come across as fixation or hyperactivity.
This isn't to say that we should strive to internalize everyone's opinion about ourselves, but that we should be open to understanding how we truly come across to others, and whether this aligns with our core principles and values. Developing these two types of self-awareness is crucial for identifying areas for improvement and using our emotions constructively.
Developing Emotional Regulation
Once we recognize our emotions and our impact on others, we can then begin to exert control over the energy we express to the world.
Emotional regulation refers to our ability to manage and control our emotions effectively, such that we're able recognize when they are accurately reflecting the circumstances around us.
For example, let's say you've had a particularly stressful morning before heading to the office, and you (like many of us do, at times) carry that negative energy with you into the workplace. Throughout the day, you may be on edge, abrasive, and potentially curt with your interactions with your team members.
Emotional regulation is one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence because it teaches us to reflect and take a step back from the situation and ask: am I reacting appropriately given the circumstances?
It's very easy to lose sight of how our emotions carry into our interpersonal relationships among our team members, and through a combination of mindfulness, deep breathing, and self distancing, we can bring ourselves back to equilibrium and stay calm, the exact kind of demeanor a leader should strive to project.
Social Awareness and Empathy
Social awareness refers to our ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others in our social circles, including our team. Self awareness is one part of social awareness, because it's easier to recognize the emotional states in others if we are already familiar with them after seeing them in ourselves. This is especially true if we are aware of our own nonverbal cues for certain emotions, such as our facial expressions and body language. Those same cues are often shared among many people, and are easily recognizable in our social groups.
Social awareness is foundational to social skills, because it allows us to approach our interactions from a place of empathy and common ground.
We can develop better social awareness by practicing active listening, where we take the time to truly hear the thoughts and concerns of our team members, and make an effort to empathize with whatever it is they are feeling, without judgment or taking sides.
For example, let's say you supervise a team member who is typically very on point and dependable, but lately, you've noticed that the quality of their work has gone down and they appear to be less engaged. Moreover, they seem tenser and more melancholy than you've ever known them to be.
Effective social awareness would prompt you to refrain from jumping to immediate, pragmatic judgment (ex: "they're just lazy"), and instead lead with empathy by considering their nonverbal cues like their tense mood and anxious body language to develop a better understanding of where they may be struggling (ex: "they appear to be going through something right now, and I'm concerned").
Effective Relationship Management
The fourth component of emotional intelligence is where the previous three components come into action: relationship management.
Relationship management involves using self-awareness, emotional regulation, and social awareness skills to establish and maintain healthy relationships. This is often reflected in competent communication skills.
Leaders with effective communication and relationship management skills often approach conflict management with assertive but non-defensive language, a respectful demeanor, and non-judgmental word choice. They are keenly aware of how their words and demeanor can come across to others (self-awareness) make an effort to communicate these emotions in a respectful manner (emotional regulation) and choose language appropriate for whomever they are speaking with (social awareness).
This relationship building skill is particularly important for not only conflict resolution, but also for inspiring a positive outlook throughout the team, and mastering the emotional dynamics of your team members with ease. Leaders with great emotional intelligence skills can manage many relationships because they truly understand the emotions behind each.
By recognizing and responding to the emotions of others, we can adapt our communication and actions accordingly, leading to more effective conflict resolution, cooperation, and teamwork.
Conclusion
By developing self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management skills, leaders can enhance their ability to connect with their team, navigate challenges, and drive success that lasts.
The benefits of emotional intelligence extend beyond individual leaders, contributing to a positive organizational culture and improved performance that feels natural.
And lastly, if there is one thing I want everyone reading today's blog post to take home with them, it's this:
Don't forget that we are all only human.
We are human beings who bring a tapestry of life experiences and emotions to our team relationships, and leaders are not immune from that fact. Instead of running from them, I implore the leaders of tomorrow to embrace emotions and recognize their innate power in building strong teams, inspiring passion, and creating a brighter workplace for all.
