Great universities draw students with big ambitions: to find a cure to a dreaded disease; to bring social upliftment to a home community; to mediate a war. Whatever your ambition, you will probably have to work with and through other people to be successful—and to lead them, when a window of opportunity opens.
Whether opportunity comes as part of a mover-and-shaker’s succession plans or simply as the result of shifted circumstances few expected, recruiters are always on the lookout for people capable of growing within an organization and providing leadership to others. And the better recruiters are acutely aware that exemplary candidates for recruitment and advancement need ways of working collaboratively with people as well as with conflict. For whatever the external challenges, the conflict is always about people.
What does it take to work with people, as they are, and to achieve mutually desirable outcomes together? Many fields have sprung up to tackle this question, including industrial psychology and conflict resolution. So have many jobs, such as ombuds—which tackle conflicts informally for employees—and mediation training for managers. Amid all this prolific growth, one critical competency that has become an established priority is emotional intelligence.
This groundbreaking concept was first articulated by Daniel Goleman in 1995, in his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and how integral it is to leadership in his article, three years later, “What Makes a Leader”, in the Harvard Business Review.
So what is “emotional intelligence” and is it not a contradiction of terms? We are taught that to work intelligently means to cultivate objectivity, so why talk of emotions?
Overall, emotional intelligence—or EI, as it is called less formally—refers to, among other things, the ability to recognize, manage, and utilize emotions appropriately in oneself and others. This means building rapport and strong connections with others, even through the difficult challenges that will surely come when people express strongly divergent views.
Exploding interest in EI has led to growing demands in the workforce for work and organizational culture that employees find meaningful and supportive, for transferable skills, and too for employee engagement in the making of decisions that will impact them. These are all factors that rank high in job selection criteria as well as job satisfaction—which in turn is pivotal in productivity.
EI competencies are also growingly recognized by recruiters as critical dimensions in the profile of their outstanding managers and supervisors. Knowledge and skills of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are cited more often than technical or analytic competency as the differentiator between rudimentary management of others and exemplary leadership.
Some of the greatest leaders of the past century have been highly emotionally intelligent. Nelson Mandela, on trial and facing a possible death sentence in apartheid South Africa in 1964, talked of the rage that would result for all South Africans from unchecked state violence. Thirty-one years later, he donned the jersey of the Springboks—the national team in the sport of rugby, traditionally a white sport—uniting the polarized nation before the World Cup final.
Indra Nooyi, former CEO and chair of board of PepsiCo, personally called the parents of the members of her senior leadership team to congratulate the parents on the wonderful job they had done in raising their kids!
In the workplace, EI competencies are vividly apparent when leaders—and leaders in the making—manage conflict productively; provide effective facilitation in groups; offer feedback in ways that enhance performance and build colleagues—not degrade them; recognize and work with generational differences; work to mentor, motivate, and develop potential leaders; and manage the turmoil that ensues from the demands of inevitable shifts in industry. Emotional intelligence is a deal-maker both for the individuals and the organizational employees.
That’s leadership.
It begins by acknowledging the value of managing your own emotional life—rather than blaming and denigrating others—and finding in conflict the opportunities to collaborate and grow, together.
Dr. Terry Savage an associate professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies, Halmos College and a regular contributor to Mako Media Network. Dr. Neil Katz is a professor of Conflict Resolution and Social Science in the same department, and for more than five decades has been teaching, researching and writing about organizational leadership. Katz has also consulted with more than 150 corporate, educational, governmental and non-profit organizations.
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