What Do The Best Leaders Have In Common?
By Studiowide
What distinguishes great leaders from just adequate ones?
Hint: It isn’t IQ or technical ability, it’s emotional intelligence.
The ability to monitor your feelings and those of others to guide your thinking and behaviour. Technical skills and ability do matter of course but emotional intelligence is twice as important for jobs at all levels and in the top tier it accounts for nearly 90% of the difference between average and star performers.
Studies also show a strong link between emotional intelligence and bottom-line results. At one company, divisions whose senior managers scored high in emotional intelligence beat their yearly earnings goals by 20%. Divisions without such leaders underperformed by almost as much.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman identified five components of emotional intelligence:
1. Self-Awareness
This means thoroughly understanding yourself and your effect on others. For example, a self-aware person who struggles with deadlines plans ahead. Self-aware employee’s welcome feedback. Another sign is a self-deprecating sense of humour. People who admit to failure easily and with a smile. Self-aware people know their abilities and play to their strengths, but they don’t overreach and aren’t afraid to ask for help.
Leaders who see themselves clearly also see their companies clearly. But it’s easy to overlook self-awareness when sizing up potential leaders. You might assume that someone who admits to shortcomings isn’t tough enough to lead, when in fact the opposite is true. Leaders must constantly judge capabilities – in themselves and in others.
2. Self-Regulation
The second component of emotional intelligence is Self-Regulation – controlling disruptive impulses and thinking before acting.
For example, a manager whose team has botched a big order might want to pound the table in anger. But if he has a gift for self-regulation he’ll consider the reasons for the failure, share his thoughts with the team and propose a solution. Leaders who control their feelings create an atmosphere of fairness and trust. This reduces politics and infighting, so productivity is higher. It also draws talented people in and curbs unethical behaviour.
3. Emotional Intelligence
If there is one trait that virtually all great leaders have, it’s motivation – the third component of emotional intelligence. Motivated people are driven to achieve beyond expectations – not for money or status, but because they’re passionate about their work. Motivated people also want to be ‘stretched’ and are always raising the performance bar. And they’re optimistic – even when the going gets tough.
Let’s consider one Area Production Manager whose plant margins took a dive and lost significant value over an entire reporting period. Some people would have blamed external circumstances. Others might have taken it as a personal failure. Instead, this manager saw a chance to prove he could lead a turnaround and that optimism paid off. It’s not hard to see why motivation makes for great leadership. Someone who sets the bar high for himself will do the same for his company and the drive to exceed goals is often contagious.
4. Empathy
We’ve all seen the fourth component, empathy in a sensitive teacher or friend.
Empathetic people read between the lines of what’s said and this makes them especially good at understanding and supporting group dynamics. Empathy doesn’t mean trying to please everyone – that’s impossible. But it does mean considering other people’s feeling when making decisions. Empathy is more crucial now than ever for three reasons. The prevalence of teams. The rapid pace of change and the growing need to attract and retain talent. Teams are cauldrons bubbling with emotions and a leader has to make sense of all of them if the team is going to collaborate well. Empathetic people have a good feel for cultural differences and gain understanding from body language and other cues.
Empathy is also crucial to retaining talent. Studies show that coaching and mentoring pay off not just in performance but also in increasing satisfaction and decreased staff churn. Consider what happened when two Commercial Offices merged. The manager of one business gave a gloomy speech to his team feeling that lots of jobs were sure to be cut. Not surprisingly, many people were demoralised and quit. A more empathetic manager expressed his concerns calmly and he promised to keep people informed and treat everyone fairly.
His business remained productive – and the best people stayed.
5. Social Skill
The last component of emotional intelligence is social skill.
This isn’t simply friendliness – it’s friendliness with a purpose and it draws on all of the other four components.
Socially skilled people are great at building and leading teams – that’s their empathy at work. They’re also expert persuaders because their self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy tell them when to make an emotional plea, for instance and when to appeal to reason. And they’re excellent collaborators. Their passion for the work spreads to others and their motivation drives them to find solutions.
Remember that social skill can be tricky to spot. You might think an employee chatting in the hall is wasting time – maybe he’s talking to someone who isn’t even connected to his job. But socially skilled people don’t arbitrarily limit their relationships. They know they might need help tomorrow from someone they’re just meeting today.
You probably know people who are strong in some of the 5 areas of emotional intelligence but sadly lacking in others. This raises the question is emotional intelligence a fixed quality or can it be learned?
Fortunately, although science reveals a strong genetic component, that’s not the whole story.
It takes enormous commitment and work to cultivate emotional intelligence, but the benefits more than repay the effort. For today’s leaders, this quality is not a ‘nice to have’ – it’s a ‘need to have’.
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