One may think of a perfect leader and come up with many alternatives. It could be a leader with a high-level of managing temper irrespective of the challenge, a leader who has absolute trust in his or her employees, listens, makes intelligent decisions, and provides feedback and has others desirable qualities.
These are qualities of a leader with high standards of emotional intelligence. In this article, the writer explores how emotional intelligence influences leadership, employee motivation and performance. It also shows how a leader can improve on emotional intelligence because they can learn, although with a great effort and commitment.
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to comprehend and manage one’s emotions and emotions of other people (Salovey and Mayer 185). Leaders who have high-levels of emotional intelligence understand their feelings, meanings of their emotions and effects of those emotions on other people.
For people in leadership positions, having EI is critical for success. Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist who perfected EI. He focused on five key elements of EI, which could influence leadership. These included self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, social skills, and motivation. Goleman believes that “effective leaders are alike in one way: they all have a high degree of emotional intelligence” (Goleman 94). Leaders who tend to manage these elements normally have high standards of emotional intelligence.
Self-awareness helps leaders to understand their own feelings. In addition, they also understand how their emotions and actions could affect their staff. Self-awareness also allows leaders to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. This makes leaders to act or behave with humility.
Leaders with self-awareness demonstrate a high degree of self-confidence, realistic self-assessment, and self-deprecating sense of humor (Goleman 95). Leaders can improve on self-awareness by tracking their thoughts, feelings, and actions through journals. In addition, they can also mitigate their feelings of anger and other strong emotions. It is imperative to note that irrespective of prevailing situations, people can choose how to react.
Self-regulation is a quality that allows leaders to stay in control of their decisions, maintain their values, and avoid stereotyping or attacking others. Such leaders can control disruptive emotions and think before taking any action. In addition, they also have high degrees of integrity, embrace change, and tolerate ambiguity.
Goleman observes that self-regulation allows leaders to be flexible and be personally accountable because it demands integrity and trustworthiness from leaders (Goleman 98). Leaders can use some strategies to improve on their abilities to self-regulate. First, it is important for leaders to understand their values and know factors that can make them to compromise those values. This allows leaders to understand important values for them, avoid ethical dilemmas, and make right ethical decisions.
Moreover, leaders who understand themselves are able to create an environment of trust and fairness. Second, leaders need to hold themselves accountable in order to develop self-regulating abilities. Some leaders blame their teams because of failures. Instead, leaders should be accountable, review failures, and face their consequences. This makes leaders accountable and improves trust within the team. Finally, leaders should learn to remain calm in all situations, even in a challenging situation.
They should learn to relieve stress without affecting others. Stress and conflicts are also present in medical organizations. For instance, Jeanne Morrison noted cases of conflicts and stress in the nursing profession because of “inadequate salary, a lack of appreciation and fairness, increasing workloads with critical cases and poor relations with colleagues” (Morrison 974).
Hence, the need to understand how to handle stress and conflicts in medical organizations was critical for employees. Morrison noted that it was impossible to eliminate conflicts and stress at workplaces but observed that learning “essential emotional intelligence (EI) skills could be helpful” (Morrison 975). Leaders must understand how to control their strong emotions and negative feelings and thoughts.
Self-motivated leaders have tendencies of working constantly toward their objectives. Moreover, they believe in exceptionally high stands of achievements. These leaders have deep desire to achieve just for the sake of impressive results. In addition, they also show energy, persistence, optimism, commitment to organizations and strong drive to excel. Leaders who lack a sense of motivation should improve on it.
First, a leader and his or her staff should re-examine their jobs and understand their roles and contributions to organizations. Leaders should motivate people through appreciation and in some cases, through monetary rewards. A leader should understand factors that lead to a lack of motivation within his or her team and formulate strategic ways of motivating employees.
Most importantly, leaders must understand how motivated they are by assessing themselves in order to lead others. Leaders should be optimistic amidst failure and find reasons to put effort in their roles. Motivated leaders tend to analyze a situation, understand causes of failures, and master lesson learned for improvement. For such leaders, situations tend to be positive rather than negative. Motivated employees are likely to performance best than others.
Another factor of emotional intelligence is empathy. For a leader, empathy is an imperative factor that can lead to successful leadership in an organization. Leaders with empathy understand situations of others, their emotional composition, and possess skills required to react to other people based on their emotions. These leaders have abilities to build and retain talents, show cross-cultural sensitivity and offer services to their stakeholders.
Hence, leaders with empathy develop others within the team, challenge team members who have negative attitudes, listen, and provide constructive feedback to team members. Leaders who have earned respect and loyalty in organizations are empathetic toward others. One can learn empathy by understanding others’ situations. Although it is simple to maintain one’s position and point of view, it is advisable to understand situations from others’ perspectives too.
Empathy also involves understanding body language. Body language could tell others how one feels about a position. Leaders who have mastered the art of body language understand how people feel when they address them. As a result, they are able to respond appropriately in a given situation. Leaders should also learn how to respond to feelings of others, especially in cases where employees feel that their jobs are frustrating them.
Leaders who understand social skills as a component of emotional intelligence also understand communication skills, interpersonal relations, and conflict resolution among others. They are good at building new relations and maintaining networks with colleagues. Moreover, such leaders can find neutral grounds and create rapport in a team. Leaders who possess social skills are good in leading organizational change, persuading others, and building teams.
Such leaders can accommodate both good and bad news. They can also get support from team members to support new initiatives. Social skills allow such leaders to resolve conflicts cautiously, get logical conclusions and demonstrate leadership through their own actions.
One can build social skills by learning how to resolve conflicts in organizations and with other external partners. Improving communication skills can help leaders to develop their emotional intelligence and communicate effectively. Team members also require praise from their leaders. This inspires team effort and loyalty.
In order to be an effective leader, a broad understanding of emotions and their impacts on others is imperative for leaders. A good leader relates and works effectively with different members of an organization. This leads to successful leadership. As Goleman shows, emotional intelligence makes a leader. Hence, leaders should improve on their self-awareness, motivation, social skills, self-regulation, and empathy. Leaders should understand their emotions, emotions of others and express them appropriately.
People who understand their emotions also understand emotions of others and predict reactions in different situations. Thus, emotional intelligence influences leadership by trying to improve it and create a favorable working environment in an organization, which contributes positively in employee motivation and job performance.
Luckily, previous studies and Goleman show that one can learn emotional intelligence (Goleman 92; Guillén and Florent-Treacy 2-30). It is not simple to develop emotional intelligence through normal studying of available literature (Davies 1). Instead, the process requires training, practice, effort, and support.
Under some circumstances, employees may provide feedback on leadership performance and management styles of executives based on their behavioral outcomes and evaluation criteria. Although some leaders may consider such feedback as threatening and confronting, particularly if they do not appreciate feedback from juniors, it is the most imperative process in developing leadership emotional intelligence because feedback helps in identification of gaps and areas for improvement.
Works Cited
Davies, Sean. Leadership in Action: Emotional intelligence and leadership. n.d. Web.
Goleman, Daniel. “What makes a leader.” Harvard Business Review (1998): 92-103. Print.
Guillén, Laura and Elizabeth Florent-Treacy. Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Effectiveness: The Mediating Influence of Collaborative Behaviors. 2011. Web.
Morrison, Jeanne. “The relationship between emotional intelligence competencies and preferred conflict-handling styles.” Journal of Nursing Management 16 (2008): 974–983. Print.
Salovey, Peter and John Mayer. “Emotional intelligence.” Imagination, cognition, and personality 9.3 (1990): 185-211. Print.