EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND LEADERSHIP MANAGEMENT ASSIGNMENT
Leadership and Intelligence: The Power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept—who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings—are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics. —Daniel Goleman
Enhancing one’s leadership impact is clearly much more than applying a recipe or following a list of steps. First, recipes may or may not fit one’s style and personality. Second, if one is not skilled or genuine in using the recipe, potential followers will see through it in a New York minute. And third, formulaic approaches to managing people often run into the dilemma of what to do with the exceptions. People are so “organic,” they keep creating variations on themes. Even in surgery, for example, doctors know that every person’s anatomy will be a little bit different. That said, most observers believe that intelligence is an important precursor to effective leadership. Smart people are generally considered to have the best potential for being the leaders of industry, nations, and institutions. Interestingly, a study of valedictorians, however, indicates that after twenty years, most of them are working for their classmates.1 This counter-intuitive result causes us to rethink our beliefs about intelligence and its relationship to effective leadership.
For more than a century, business leaders have, for the most part, tried to downplay emotions in business as unprofessional, undisciplined, and unrelated to good decision-making. This stems in part from the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment in western civilization. Knowledge, said Sir Francis Bacon, is power. Like the other philosophers of the Enlightenment, Bacon saw knowledge as the pathway to universal liberation and emotions and passions as obstacles to knowledge. Many of the leadership models taught in business schools have focused on rational decision making in which emotions are viewed as detriments or obstacles to making good decisions. Students are taught to search for the “right answer” and to do so in a rigorously analytical and logical way.
Further, American school systems have focused on the notion of rational intelligence in striving to educate millions of children. The concept of intelligence quotient (or IQ) has been the most prominent measure of intelligence. School systems designed curricula with the intent of utilizing more of students’ IQs if not adding to them. While the validity of IQ tests and their general intelligence or aptitude substitutes have come into question in recent years,2 tests of purely rational thinking—the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the General Management Aptitude Test (GMAT), for example—still wield a great deal of influence over our individual academic opportunities and those of our children.
Recently, however, some startling conclusions about the nature of intelligence—many of them directly at odds with old assumptions—have begun to emerge. Daniel Goleman points out three important inferences we can draw from recent studies:
- Existing standardized intelli- gence tests fail to predict success in life or in business because they do not tell the whole story. Intelligence is not singular; it comes in a number of forms—i.e.,multiple intelligences—and intellectual intelligence, the kind measured by IQ tests, is only one
- Emotion, while it can sometimes sabotage clear-headed thought, has been scientifically shown to be an indispensable contributor to rational thinking and decision-making. As oxymoronic as it would have seemed to Sir Francis Bacon, there is a range of intelligences which can be called emotional; they are important for aspiring business leaders to understand better.
- Despite traditional views that IQ is inherited and that one cannot do much to change it, the newly recognized various intelligences seem to be, to a large extent,
Not One Intelligence, But Many: Gardner’s Research
Goleman draws on the work of several researchers to demonstrate the existence of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard University School of Education, found the longstanding notion of a single kind of intelligence both wrongheaded and injurious. He blamed this belief largely on the IQ test itself—calling it the “IQ way of thinking: people are either smart or not, are born that way, that there’s nothing much you can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you are one of the smart ones. The SAT test for college admissions is based on the same notion of a single kind of aptitude that determines your future. This way of thinking permeates society.”3 Statistically speaking, IQ measurements, SAT scores, and grades turn out to be relatively poor predictors of who will succeed in life and who will not. (Goleman puts the contribution of IQ to a person’s success at about 20 percent.)
Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking 1993 book, Frames of Mind, repudiated the idea of one kind of intelligence and the IQ way of thinking by positing a wide array of intelligences. Gardner identified seven: verbal, mathematical-logical, spatial (as demonstrated by painters or pilots), kinesthetic (as seen in the physical grace of a dancer or athlete), musical, interpersonal (upon which a therapist or a diplomat might rely), and intra-personal intelligence (something akin to self-awareness). Gardner’s perspective explained why traditional tests had been ineffective in predicting success: they measured only one or two of many necessary and important kinds of intelligence.
Goleman took Gardner’s “personal” kinds of intelligences—the inter-personal and the intra-personal—and cited hundreds of studies to create a story that described something he called “emotional intelligence,” or EQ. Goleman asserted that EQ was just as important as IQ in helping people become effective leaders. As Gardner pointed out, “Many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100, if the former have low intra-personal intelligence and the latter are high. And in the day-to-day world no intelligence is more important than the interpersonal. If you don’t have it, you’ll make poor choices about who to marry, what job to take, and so on. We need to train children in the personal intelligences in school.” It’s a compelling argument. Let’s examine IQ and EQ and some related concepts in more detail.
Intellectual Intelligence
IQ (which we will use as a substitute for mental capacity in general) is largely genetic but can be honed or made more manifest by curiosity, by discipline in studying, and by adding a range of experiences to a person’s life. While your IQ depends in large part on the mental machinery you inherited from your parents, if you are curious, learn to discipline yourself in your study habits, and seek out new experience, you can bring your mental capacity to the fore. You may not be able to change your IQ score on IQ tests much, but you can learn to do more with what you have been given. If you don’t know your IQ, don’t worry about it, for, broadly speaking, while standardized tests have some predictive power (those with very low IQs often end up making little money, and those with high IQs frequently take demanding, high-powered, better paying jobs) IQ tests reflect only one kind of intelligence. There are other kinds that are equally if not more important to being “successful, and to developing leadership influence.
Characteristics of IQ
Genetic Revealed in Curiosity Honed by Discipline in Study Supported by Range of Experiences
Emotional Quotient
Emotional intelligence, as introduced by Goleman, is basically the ability to manage your own emotions. It begins with the ability to recognize your emotions, then to understand them, and finally to manage yourself out of what Goleman calls “emotional hijackings.” In this view, IQ is your brain power while EQ is your emotional control power.
The first step to developing your EQ is to learn to recognize your emotions. Many people are not very aware of their emotions, although they often say they are.
Have you ever talked with someone who seemed visibly upset, whose neck veins were bulging, whose face was red, whose voice was raised? Yet, when you asked them to calm down, they screamed, “I AM calm!” This person is not in touch with his or her own emotional reality or experience. Another manifestation of the difficulty people have in recognizing their emotions appears when you ask people how they are feeling; they often will describe behaviors or thoughts. Many are not skilled in recognizing and paying attention to their own emotional state. For many of these people, this is because they have learned that the emotional world is not legitimate, and after years of practicing to suppress or subdue their emotions, they have lost touch with how they feel. I’m repeatedly surprised by how few talented, practicing managers and leaders are able to identify and talk about their emotions.
Components of Emotional Intelligence EQ
Recognizing your own emotions Managing your emotions appropriately Productive self-talk out of emotional hijackings
Aware of them or not, people can often become prisoners of their emotions. In Goleman’s terms, they get “hijacked” by their emotions and lose control of their rational processes. An emotional hijacking occurs when a person begins with a little emotion that then builds and builds in intensity until the person is not thinking clearly and is overwhelmed by the emotion. The most common emotional hijackings are related to anger, fear, and depression. A person hijacked by anger, for instance, may be a little irritated at first, but as time passes, becomes more and more angry until they are bursting at the seams, and acting openly hostile, whether the situation calls for such behavior or not. People with a low EQ who become angry, afraid, or depressed find themselves in an ever-widening spiral of emotions to the point where they are unable to think clearly or to make good decisions.
Consider a hijacking by fear. Modern equipment has given us much greater insight into how this hijacking occurs, because we can trace with increasing accuracy the electrical impulses that course through the brain during different events. We used to think that when a person saw something dangerous like a snake, the eye would send a signal to the thinking part of the brain, the brain would consciously register “danger” and send signals to the muscles to move quickly— and we would jump. We’ve learned in fact, that there is a “short circuit” that bypasses the thinking part of the brain and transmits danger signals directly to two small, almond-sized structures (the amygdalas) that sit atop the human brain stem.
The amygdala is an old structure in terms of the development of the human brain; it evolved earlier than the neocortex above it (that handles conscious thought) and its functioning is largely beyond the control of the thinking brain. When it receives a short-circuit signal from the optic nerve that you’ve seen a snake, the amygdala immediately begins a complex chemical process which pumps muscle stimulants into the blood stream and you literally jump without thinking. If a person’s ability to manage these chemical outbursts is underdeveloped, this can create a growing whirlpool of fear, so strong that you could jump when you should hold still or be paralyzed by the fear when you should jump. When you’re so enraged that you can’t “think straight,” or “so blue in the face that you can’t function,” you could blame your amygdala and its partners in the limbic system.
Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa, studied patients with damage to the circuits between the amygdala and the brain’s memory center. These patients showed no IQ deterioration at all, and yet their decision-making skills were amazingly poor. They made disastrous choices in their careers and personal lives; the most mundane decisions— white bread or wheat?—often left them paralyzed with confusion. Damasio concluded that their decision making was impaired because they had no access to their emotional learning. Searching their memories for the last time they were in the same situation, they didn’t remember how they felt about the outcome because the emotional lessons, stored in or regulated by the amygdala, apparently were out of reach.
One of the most dramatic examples was of a man working with dynamite on a road crew. In an accident, the steel tamping rod he used to pack the dynamite in a hole drilled into rock was propelled out of the hole and through his brain, leaving him miraculously alive and physically well. But as time passed, it became clear that the limbic (the part of the brain related to emotion) portion of his brain had been damaged, so that although he could calculate numbers and solve equations, he could not express a preference for meeting time, sock color, or any of the other myriad decisions you and I make every day. He had lost the emotional value of alternatives— and became unable to make even simple decisions.4
Damasio’s research (and that of those like him) suggests that the conventional wisdom imparted to us by the Age of Reason philosophers and the intervening years of scientific and business experience was, at least part of the time, wrong: emotions are in fact essential for rational decisions. Memories of ecstatic successes and painful failures help steer the decisions we make every day.
By contrast, people who have a strong connection between the amygdala and the neocortex seem to be better equipped to make good decisions, good decisions that are based on a balancing of rational and emotional input rather than one without the other. Applying this insight to business and organizational life, it seems clear that people who have learned over the years to manage their emotions have learned to manage their behavior and their relationships better—and that this translates into more success in the social world of business.
To a certain extent, just like IQ, we’re stuck with the emotional cards we’re dealt at birth: depression, for instance, has been shown to have a hereditary component. But the good news is that EQ seems to be more responsive to learning activities than IQ. You can develop emotional skills which will help enrich both your personal and professional life. Let’s explore some ways one can improve one’s EQ.
Recognizing your own emotions. The first step toward building your EQ, of course, is recognizing, being aware of, your emotions. It may seem to you a simple task, that your feelings are self-evident and that this point is hardly worth making, but closer examination reveals otherwise.
We all sometimes lose sight of our emotions. Goleman offers examples of situations we all recognize: “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” and being grouchy all day long. What we would call “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” might actually have stemmed from kicking your toe on the bathroom door, from a curt exchange with your significant other, bad news on the radio, a bad night’s sleep stemming from heavy dinner or some modest chemical imbalance. Perhaps it was related really to rainy weather. Whatever the source, with this initial emotional set, many people are unaware that they are behaving crossly or seem depressed or “down” throughout their work day.
Being aware of emotions requires reflection. If one learns to pause, to focus inward, and to seek one’s emotions, one can become more aware of them. You might begin asking yourself several times during a normal day, “What am I feeling now?” If you do this for a week, you will probably be able to notice what you feel more readily. Then the challenge, one accepted by people with high EQs, is to manage those emotions in a more positive way. People who have developed a high EQ do not yield to their emotions easily; they seek to manage them.
Managing your emotions. Maybe the thought of managing your emotions is too “rational” for you, or too contrived. Perhaps you prefer to allow your emotions to ebb and flow and you like the spontaneity of them. That’s fine. The point here is that the data seem to suggest that if you manage your emotions—not just suppressing them and ignoring them, but becoming more aware of them and dealing with them—you are more likely to have a positive impact on yourself and the people around you at work or elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of the potentially debilitating emotions of anger, fear, and depression.
To a person with low EQ, emotional hijacking may seem like an irresistible call to action: anger leads to shouting, fear leads to fleeing, depression leads to crying or withdrawal. But with practice, the urgings of the amygdala can be overcome through what Goleman calls (borrowing from Albert Ellis among others) productive “self-talk.”5 When someone cuts you off on the highway, in other words, you don’t have to respond by yelling, pounding on the steering wheel, and clenching your jaw and arm muscles. There are options.To manage one’s emotions, one must first decide that one wants to be in control of them. This is not to say that one can manage emotions by will power alone, but unless one decides to do so, one is not likely to increase one’s EQ. If you say to yourself, I want to learn how to not be angry so often, or not to be depressed so often, or to be more courageous, this is a start.
Productive Self-Talk. Next, we begin to develop productive self-talk: recognizing our emotions and then pausing to “talk to ourselves” and to examine the perhaps irrational links that we make between an external event and our emotional reactions to it. Consider the rude driver again. If you imagine that maybe, just maybe, the driver who cut you off is in a hurry to get to the hospital, there suddenly seems to be less to get angry about. Even if you conclude that driver is just being self-centered and rude, you can still say to yourself, “Well, I may wish that he weren’t that way, and I cannot control the behavior of others, so why should I let a complete stranger ruin my moment or day?”
In the case of anxiety, the analytical thought process is itself often the source of trouble: some people can worry about almost anything. If you choose, however, to look at your pessimistic assumptions critically (Is this bad outcome really inevitable? What other possible outcomes are there? Isn’t there something constructive I could do to improve my chances for a favorable outcome?), you may be able gradually to break them down. People with a high EQ have learned over the years how to do this. Sometimes they use productive self-talk, other times they might even use physical relaxation methods such as meditation or prayer, as means to help stem the onset of anxiety, once it has been recognized.
All of this is a personal challenge. Do you think you can manage your emotions? Would you like to be able to do so? Are you willing to test your abilities to do so? If you can, I think, not only will you feel better about your life, you’ll be better able to manage your relationships. While Goleman lumped the personal and interpersonal aspects of EQ into one concept, I’ll separate them here for clarity’s sake.
Social Quotient
Goleman asserted that a high EQ had a positive impact on one’s relationships. If EQ is the ability to manage one’s emotions, then social quotient or SQ has to do with recognizing and managing the emotions in interpersonal relationships. SQ skills are similar to those used in EQ, but they are directed toward others in relationship. Hence, the SQ skills include recognizing emotions in others, developing a concern or caring about the emotional state of others, and being able to help them manage their emotional states.
Like EQ, SQ can in large part be learned. And in an organizational world which places a premium on interpersonal skills—in which you can’t, as they say, “fax or e-mail a handshake”— a well-developed SQ can take you places that IQ, by itself, cannot. Similar to EQ, the skills of recognizing, caring about, and managing emotions are important in SQ.
Recognizing the emotions of others. This is the interpersonal corollary to the EQ skill of recognizing your own emotions. The better you are at under-standing your own emotions, the more likely you are to be adept at picking up on the feelings of others. The difficulty with “tuning in” on the emotional state of another, of course, is that people don’t usually put their emotions into words. More often, they express them nonverbally—through cues like tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, and other forms of “body language.” Some research suggests that, in general, women are better than men at this kind of attunement; however, the ability to see emotions in others is something that anyone with some attention and effort can learn.
Components of Social Intelligence SQ
Recognizing emotions in others. Listening Caring about the emotional state of others. Helping others manage their emotions.
In the organizational environment, opportunities for this kind of learning are plentiful. In meetings, sales presentations, and chance exchanges with subordinates and superiors, attention to nonverbal cues can yield sharp insights into what another person is experiencing emotionally. Knowing how to read the signs is a valuable interpersonal skill. Practice in your conversations, in your meetings, and in group settings. While you listen, see if you can identify the emotions of the people you’re talking with. At first, this may be confusing to you; however, if you practice, it will become second nature. You’ll learn to listen more completely.
Listening. Lots of people give lip service to the concept of listening as an important leadership skill. Yet many don’t listen well because they focus only on content. Listening, as it applies to SQ, means more than just letting someone else speak. It means listening attentively, with an ear—and an eye—toward recognizing emotion in addition to content. It means putting out of your mind, for a moment at least, what you plan to say when it’s your turn to respond. It means seeing if you can register what the other person’s heart—not just their mouth—is saying. The challenge is to be conscious of the emotions the other person is experiencing. If you’re able to see what the other is feeling, then the question is, “Do you care?”
Empathy and caring. When you become open to and aware of the feelings of others, you become able to empathize—to tune into their emotional experience. Empathy—and the caring for another’s well-being which usually, but not always, results—is a Level Three connection that binds us in our personal lives and strengthens our attempts at leadership. When we can see what others feel and when we care about that, we have a major opportunity to influence and be influenced. If you are able to help others manage their emotions, you can be a Level Three leader.
Helping Others Manage their Emotions: If you see the emotions of others, if you care about that emotional reality for them, and if you have the skills that allow you to help them manage their emotions, you will have the opportunity to influence others. This is a powerful form of leadership.
In some cases, you may help others manage their internal emotions, to help them out of emotional hijackings. A personal example relates to my youngest child. As an eight-year-old girl, she was very talented and energetic, and she also had a tendency to become overwhelmed by daily events. When she was feeling this way, she could talk herself into a dither until she wound up a sobbing heap on the couch or in her bed. As parents, we could see this emotional storm developing almost as clearly as the gathering rain clouds on the horizon outside. Armed with Goleman’s insights, we tried to help her manage her emotions by talking with her and helping her to see that a) she could get control of her feelings and could stop the downward spiral, b) she could focus on only one thing that needs to be done and do it without worrying about the others, and c) she could begin to feel good about herself not only for doing that one thing but also for managing her feelings. I’m happy to note that several years later, now, she has become much more adept at seeing her own emotions and at managing them. Perhaps it was just the passage of time. I think not. For many, the passage of time does nothing more than reinforce their earlier conclusions.
Coworkers in business are similar. You can help some of them learn to manage their emotions more effectively. One starts with trying to find out why they are feeling what they feel. Often, emotions are based on a comparison between an event and an underlying VABE (value, assumption, belief, or expectation). If you ask yourself or them, “Why are they feeling that way?” you can begin to get insight into their basic values and assumptions. If you can understand those, you can see more clearly how they respond to the world around them. Then you may begin to help the person reexamine those assumptions. While many managers feel ill at ease with this approach, those who have some skill at it are able to have some profound impact on colleagues.
SQ also can come into play in helping others manage their emotions in relationships. One of the most valuable skills in the organizational environment—and one of the most striking examples of SQ in action—lies in resolving conflicts and disputes. Conflicts arise frequently in the business world, sometimes accompanied by heated feelings and accusations. All too often, “solutions” are handed down from above—and emotionally speaking, these are solutions in name only: business goes on, but someone inevitably comes away feeling wronged and resentful—and perhaps in search of “payback.” In the long run, as morale and cohesiveness breaks down, the organization as a whole will suffer.
Developing skill in managing emotionally charged conflict situations is a valuable personal asset. When people have low EQs and SQs, they can let their emotions get the better of them. When one is skilled in recognizing emotions and in managing emotions, in themselves and in their relationships, one can help balance the rational content and the emotional content and influence people to make better decisions. Good mediators are not only smart, they have strong EQ and SQ skills.
Here’s a simple example. An employee reacts to a coworker’s criticism, gets hijacked, and launches a volley of defensive remarks that make matters more volatile and charged. A person with high EQ skills would instead have turned to “self-talk,” interpreting the criticism judiciously in order to keep destructive emotions in check. In much the same way, a high-SQ mediator can explain to the injured party that the remarks may not have been intended to wound; that at any rate, the comments are only data and not necessarily fact; and these need not be internalized unless one chooses to do so. The mediator might then explain to the critic better words to have chosen, if one wants to influence others.
“Common sense!” you say? Yes, common for people with high SQ, maybe not so common for people with lower SQs. One person, gifted in SQ, can help offset the EQ deficiencies of many others—and in so doing, is likely to be seen by coworkers as an extra- ordinary kind of person, a person worthy of leadership. Needless to say, organizations find such mediators and leaders extremely valuable. And conflict-resolution skills, the skills of SQ, as any diplomat or marriage counselor will tell you, can be learned.
Change Quotient
Another kind of intelligence should be introduced here. It’s not one that Gardner or Goleman identified explicitly, but it has a big impact on leadership and the ability to lead. I call it “CQ” or Change Quotient. People seem to vary in their change intelligence, their ability to recognize the need for change, their comfort in managing change, and their understanding of and mastery of the change process.
High-CQ people are the so-called lifelong learners who adapt to rapidly changing business environments much better than their more stubborn counterparts. When high CQ people look at challenges, they see opportunities rather than threats. They are willing to learn whatever skills a situation calls for rather than look for ways to reapply what they already know. Here are a few ideas for managing your development in CQ.
Components of Change Intelligence CQ
Recognizing the need for change Understanding the Change Process Mastering implementing the Change Process Comfort in managing the Change Process
Recognizing the need to change. Many people find it difficult to recognize signals of change that surround them in the environment. Maybe the signals are coming from customers, from significant others, from employees, from the financial indicators, or from colleagues and peers. E.C. Zeeman, an English researcher, made an interesting observation in this regard. He noted that drunk drivers are very dangerous: they begin to steer off the road, see a tree, overcorrect, see oncoming headlights, and overcorrect again, perhaps plowing into the next set of trees. Then he noted that, paradoxically, sober drivers drive the same way. That is, sober drivers never drive perfectly straight, they see disconfirming data coming in and make a small mid- course correction. The difference is that the drunk driver’s ability to see the disconfirming data is impaired, and he or she waits until too late to make the appropriate correction. Of course, the opposite is equally dangerous: people who are hypersensitive to incoming data may get so overloaded that they become paralyzed.
We can apply the same reasoning to business leaders. Effective leaders will have a high CQ, that is, they will be able to recognize the need for change before it’s too late. In fact, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric for the last twenty years of the last century, takes as one of his six core leadership maxims, “Change before you have to.”9 The ability to sift from among a multitude of signals; pick out the ones that are important, combined with a willingness to change; to consider new ways of doing things; and the mastery or skill of implementing new changes are critical for leaders-to-be.
Understanding and Mastering the Change Process. Many people are afraid of things they don’t understand. The more we understand and become competent with something, the less frightening it becomes. Change is no different. There are some predictable patterns and reactions to change that can be described and understood. One can practice managing small change efforts and in so doing become more adept at managing larger ones. A general change process and ways of managing it are presented in a later chapter devoted to that topic.
Emotional comfort with change. For many of us, there isn’t much that’s comforting, in and of itself, about change; by definition it means getting out of our comfort zone and experiencing different things. While some people enjoy and seek “out of the comfort zone” experiences, most of us seek comfort and solace in the things we know well. But one sign of a high CQ is a positive emotional attitude toward regular change: the feeling that change will be for the better, and ought to be embraced. In one management seminar, a participant describing one of his core leadership principles, said, “Pain is your friend.” What he meant by that was that learning is almost always the result of something that is uncomfortable or in some way, even a small way, painful, and that learning is good because it helps enhance your competitive advantage, hence, pain is your friend.
This idea is consistent with the theme of the best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, by Scott Peck.10 Peck argues that most people take the comfortable road, the one they know, but that the person who learns and grows and contributes more takes the road less traveled, the one with a little discomfort, a little pain, a little learning in it. He notes that taking this path usually means a little extra effort. And it usually means a person who is better adapted to the world around them and more influential in it.
Conclusion
In Emotional Intelligence Goleman uses the metaphor of a journey to underscore the idea that emotional learning is not a single lesson but a course of study: “In this book I serve as a guide in a journey through these scientific insights into the emotions, a voyage aimed at bringing greater understanding to some of the most perplexing moments in our own lives and in the world around us.” As with most journeys, a guide can only take you so far. In the end, each traveler must make the effort to get from one place to another. The challenge and invitation presented by this chapter to each of us is to assess our emotional preparedness for leadership and to invest in our abilities to improve that kind of intelligence. This means viewing intelligence in a broader context, one that includes not only IQ, but also EQ, SQ and CQ.
Principles of Effective Leadership Introduced in this Note
- While intelligence is often associated with good leaders, recent research suggests that effective leaders have many kinds of
- Effective leaders have a high EQ; they are able to manage their emotions
- Effective leaders also have a high SQ, in that they are able to recognize and help manage emotions in
- Effective leaders also have a high CQ, the ability to recognize the need for change, and some comfort and skill in understanding and managing the change
Questions for Reflection
- How well do you manage your emotions? If you’d like a little help in assessing your EQ, you might try the Internet site, http://www.utne.com/azEQ.tmpl. This site may change. If it does, you can search the web for Emotional Intelligence to find, perhaps, another method.
- How well can you discern the emotional states of the people you work with on a daily basis? Do you ever check with them to confirm or disconfirm your views? What emotions did you observe at work this past week?
- When did you last help someone else manage their emotions? What did you do? How did it go? What could you have done better?
- How is high EQ different from stuffing or ignoring emotions? What is the consequence of both approaches?
- List the major changes you’ve made in your life. How well did you navigate them? What did you learn from them? What feelings were associated with those changes?
- What signals for change do you see around you today? What kinds of changes are these signals asking you make? How do you feel about that? Do you anticipate changing or do you avoid it?
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