Leadership Elevation: The Crucial Role of Emotional Intelligence in Selecting Leaders
IQ - Intelligence Quotient is a measure of one’s mental ability relative to one’s peers. We associated high IQs with students who always answered questions correctly in class and did well in exams. They were the ones who could understand concepts quickly and soaked in everything taught by the teacher. It was also a test of memory, because they were the ones who could recall everything they read during the term or semester.
EQ - Emotional Quotient is something that became more popular some years ago and my generation wasn’t quite acquainted with or educated in.
Emotional intelligence (otherwise known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.
I always had the misconception that the level of success you attain is directly related to your IQ. I mean, it’s practically impossible to be poor with a high IQ; You should be able to think your way out of a situation, get a better job, create a fantastic business idea, etc. I had this notion that expertise in any skill area almost guaranteed your promotion to higher job roles. It seemed quite logical, or so I thought. The real power belongs to the thinkers, and all the successful people I had read about were ‘intelligent.’
What I came to understand much later in life was that I had equated IQ to EQ. The knowledge possessed by the successful people I had come to idolize, was one of their own capabilities/emotions, and their ability to work well with others.
You see, I’ve come to realize that the most powerful people on earth do not necessarily possess the highest IQs; IQs may help you become successful at certain endeavors, e.g., a privately owned business, but you may fail miserably in tasks that involve managing others. You then find that most successful entrepreneurs usually hire a high EQ partner or close subordinate to make up for this deficiency.
In my experience at work and in a career spanning two decades with top multinationals, the people who rise to the top usually have high EQ, or EI as a thought leader in this field prefers to call it.
Who would you pick as your leader?
Every organization has its culture, and I happened to work for one of the best at some point in my career. When I looked around the organization, I found out that the people usually picked to lead most of the time had certain distinct qualities. Most people selected to be leaders in high performance corporate organizations would typically have good people skills. When a wrong promotion is made and a leader is chosen for his/her technical ability alone, the entire team under them and even the organization groans as a result of their ineffectiveness at managing people.
In his best-selling book – Emotional intelligence 2.0, Daniel argues that technical ability or capacity is an entry requirement for leadership at certain levels in an organization. I agree. Performance is a given, and no one should have made it that far up the ladder without it in the first place.
As the career pyramid narrows however, certain qualities begin to carry more weight. Emotional Intelligence EI, or EQ as it’s more popularly known begins to distinguish potential candidates.
The people tasked to lead people and keep the lifeblood of the organization flowing are usually people with a high EQ. You will observe that the study of EQ is quite recent as opposed to IQ, however, this was only because we didn’t have a name for it, it was always there. When I look back over my career, I find that the best Bosses possessed the qualities outlined in the book, and these were the primary reasons they rose to those positions.
At the same time, and in the same space as these Bosses I just described, there were others high up the ladder as well who possessed outstanding technical abilities, but they were mostly assigned to Project Director roles, or work that did not expose them to a large number of subordinates. Maybe they had been given an opportunity to manage others in the past, and it didn’t quite work out, or maybe their strengths led them to choose work that removed them from leading large teams. This is difficult to tell, but I observed that this was the case most of the time. Now forgive me if I’m kind of generalizing here, but this observation got me wondering at the criteria used to select leaders. Not all leaders had these qualities, I must say, and I considered these to be exceptions, because they didn’t stay in such roles for too long. For those who have a different experience, I already did a disclaimer that this company was one of the best at people development, so again, bear with my “biased” sample.
I did this analysis mentally whenever a senior executive would visit, and it was almost as if they all had the same kind of training. I must admit that I didn’t really understand what EQ was, I only started reading about it (seriously) while doing research for this book; yet looking back, I can tell that most of the senior leaders in that company had relatively high levels of Emotional Intelligence.
In the other companies I worked for, the number of executives with high EQ at the levels of my previous company was much less, but most of my colleagues would agree that most of us preferred to work for the kind of leaders who possessed enough of this skill to qualify them for the positions they occupied. Even when the company didn’t have the culture, or the head of the organization lacked these admirable qualities, we found that the most successful Bosses were usually high EQ people. Note again that I still didn’t relate to the EQ concept at the time, I only knew that such leaders were “good with people.”
Back to my question, “How are leaders selected?”
If an individual demonstrates the qualities in the table above consistently, and is identified as a potential C-suite material, would we say that such a person “played” office politics?
Let’s look at the qualities one by one.
SELF-AWARENESS – this person has a fully developed understanding of who he/she is and where they’re going. Like John Mason’s book title, “they’ve come to know their limits, and have ignored them.” They know what they do well and play to those strengths. They also know what they’re not good at, and have no shame admitting and owning up to such “weaknesses”.
SELF-REGULATION – refers to being in control of your impulses and feelings and knowing how to express yourself with some restraint, when to flip your handle would be tempting. This quality in a leader helps to spread an atmosphere of trust and fairness within the organization, because excusing or justifying extreme reactions could allow other leaders to hide under that blanket. Yes, if the “tone from the top” suggests that such behavior is okay, inexperienced middle managers would take advantage and unleash “terror” on their subordinates. A good leader knows how to manage his emotions and those of his team.
MOTIVATION – self-drive, as I like to call this quality, is the fire that stays lit in these people and keeps them going even after huge setbacks. They pursue their goals relentlessly and encourage others to rise up after disappointing outcomes. These people take on stretching responsibilities and work hard to develop themselves and others so as to move the company towards its objectives.
EMPATHY – they understand. They know how others feel, and they are authentic about their own emotions as well. They do not try to deflect or distract from the issues; they confront them head on and are transparent with others about events and outcomes. This does not mean that they have the answers all the time, but people just need to know that you care, most times, that is enough.
SOCIAL SKILLS – by itself, this skill appears to be reserved for extroverted people, but when you study it closely, you realize that creating networks, being selective about the kind of friendships you cultivate at work, and nurturing relationships that could be useful in the future, are just essentials of workplace success. We are given training as leaders; people and communication skills to help embed these behaviors.
