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Quick question for business leaders: Which would you rather have as a leadership skill in today’s business climate? A high IQ or high EQ?
If you answered, it depends, well, OK, you have a point. But because you’re reading this post, it means you’re probably looking for an edge in the workplace. And in the workplace, it’s no contest. A high EQ wins hands down. Taken as a whole, your EQ provides up to 80% of the competencies required to be successful. The other 20%, if you’re interested, includes IQ (10%) and technical competency (10%). One more stat: one study found that 90% of today’s successful business leaders possess high EQ.
And because the culture of work is always evolving, emotional intelligence becomes almost a prerequisite for leaders, today and into the foreseeable future. Managing emotions, your own and those of your staff, is becoming a critical skill in 21st century workplace.
Let’s Face It
Emotional challenges go down in every office: Relationships can be triggering. Projects are often stressful. Change can often come unexpectedly, requiring difficult adjustments. Emotional, physical, and psychological disruptions are pretty much expected at work. Therefore, leaders are tasked with handling those disruptions deftly, with the right emotional leadership, as well as with finesse and sensitivity. If they don’t, the disruption expands, fear and anxiety spread, rifts—both personal and professional—grow wider, and the walls start caving in. Defusing requires tactful emotional leadership.
According to Daniel Goleman, behavioral scientist, psychologist and the author of the EI bible, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and the guru of Emotional Intelligence, there are basically five buckets included in one’s EQ.
Leaders with high EQ are typically good communicators, more empathic, understand how to best overcome challenges and, therefore, experience less stress. They also possess the awareness that their own emotional presentation influences the mood and behaviors of the people around them.
Because EQ starts at the top and then spreads through an organization, in the best of cases it can result in a competitive advantage. Forward-thinking leaders can even develop and augment the EQ competencies of their staff, perhaps through an EQ action plan. Leaders also serve as the example of ideal EQ interactions, including meaningful, sincere conversations, the facilitation of skill development to reach one’s potential, and demonstrating resilience.
In practice, EQ embraces qualities such as creativity, focus, agility, collaboration, resilience, innovation, and adaptivity. Evolved EQ leaders help to foster two-way and even three-way trust: from leadership, to leadership, and from worker to worker. They preach and practice healthy, constructive, open communication by demonstrating the same and setting the tone. They are also innately curious, showing an interest by asking questions, not with suspicion, but in a way that shows real thoughtfulness and respect. Finally, leaders can and must show genuine interest in innovation, no matter where it comes from. A naturally innovative office culture will likely become the envy of an organization and blaze a red-hot trail to success.
In Conclusion
“You can be a successful leader without much emotional intelligence if you’re extremely lucky and you’ve got everything else going for you: booming markets, bumbling competitors, and clueless higher-ups,” says author Goleman in The Harvard Business Review. “If you’re incredibly smart, you can cover for an absence of emotional intelligence until things get tough for the business. But at that point, you won’t have built up the social capital needed to pull the best out of people under tremendous pressure. The art of sustained leadership is getting others to produce superior work, and high IQ alone is insufficient to that task.”
Today’s leaders need to proactively respond to situations rather than react to them. Emotional Intelligence facilitates this dynamic by providing leadership with the skills to understand how to empathize and care for their people, no matter who they are, what they’re doing and the culture they exist within. To build a staff that is resilient, able to withstand stress, change, conflicts, and challenges, companies need to invest in and develop the skills required to be emotionally intelligent. With skills in hand like trust, frank communication, respect, optimism, and empathy, organizations can move ahead with people prepared to show up and perform at a high level in virtually any circumstance.
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