Emotional Intelligence is the ability to perceive and sense the emotions of our self and to influence the emotions of other people (Connors, 2018). It is defined as the ability to manage emotions and use them in an appropriate way to guide the thinking and actions of our own and others. A person with high Emotional Intelligence tends to experience high levels of motivation, fulfillment, peace of mind, desire, and self-control. It gives a kind of signal to a person when something is going wrong or needs are not fulfilled completely. It basically deals with social, mental, and physical consequences of the emotions.
The report discusses the factors of Emotional Intelligence and how each factor compliments the effectiveness of the leadership. Secondly, this report focusses on the idea of how emotional intelligence can be taught and in what circumstances it can be learned. Emotional Intelligence provides freedom, autonomy, and balance to one person to become a good leader and win the loyalty of other people. In addition, this report also focuses on the idea that how would a person convince others that he has the ability of emotional intelligence.
The qualities linked to the leadership effectiveness and that comprises the emotionally intelligent person is given below: –
Empathy – It is capacity to understand the feelings of other people either by placing yourself in another’s position or by identifying their emotions. Empathy is of two types, affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy refers to the sensations we get in response when we feel the same kind of fear and stress of the other people by mirroring them, whereas, cognitive empathy refers to the feelings that one should identify by understanding the emotions. In other words, it should be learned through experience by storing the memories, analyzing them, and determining the way to treat those feelings the same way we want with us (Connors, 2018).
Self-Awareness – According to Goleman’s EI Competencies, self-awareness is the art to understand, recognize, and trust yourself while making decisions. A person would never be happy and productive until he becomes aware of his feelings (Emotional Intelligence, 2010). A leader with self-awareness should have strong gut feelings and self-confidence that he can manage himself in both reactive and proactive manners. As per Dr. Tasha, a leader always welcome honest feedback from their near and dear ones and reap the rewards that enhance the knowledge (Connors, 2018).
Curiosity – Curiosity is the eagerness to learn and improve more. If a leader is always curious, passionate, and lead a positive mindset, it means that he wants to achieve best out of him.
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”-Albert Einstein
This type of learning behaviour affects the other areas of life. It would make the person more tolerant, educated, and self-driven that helps in maintain good relationships (Connors, 2018).
Analytical Mind – A good leader should be a critical thinker. The most emotionally intelligent people are deep thinkers and keep on questioning every aspect of the new information they get to find a suitable way. They are resolute people who analyze the information and use the old methods to find some alternatives techniques to extract the best way. They geared themselves with the existence of “Why” that never let stops them from living a virtuous life. Having an analytical mindset fosters the leader for forever improvement and to adopt new ideas (Connors, 2018).
Belief – It is the primary component to maintain self-control. It is a kind of believe that keep on empowering the person that everyone he is doing is only due to a reason and everything will ultimately work for good. It cultivates faith in the mindset about the present and the future. Faith would never work alone, it needs the assistance of hard-work and positive attitude. If a leader believes himself then he can achieve his desire without losing hope. A great leader meditates and trusts his abilities to work positively and live boldly.
Needs and Wants – A leader should be very clear about his needs and wants. According to Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” a human being only needs basic stuff that is safety, shelter and sustenance to live. Once a person gets these basic facilities then he can move further for the wants. Some people want a big bungalow, car, and phone. These are personal desires of some people, but these are not the necessities for the living. A leader should have the knowledge of what truly he needs to take care of him and his family (Connors, 2018). Emotionally Intelligent leaders always set needs as their priority.
Conscientiousness – It is the ability to take responsibilities and be committed towards the process of self-management where it means that a person is completely responsible for the actions and reactions in any situation of the emotions. In other words, he would be totally responsible for the work and quality produced by him. It is the personality trait of the effective and careful leader to do all the tasks in an organized manner as opposed to the easy going and disorderly people.
Adaptability – It is the difficult mode of self-management when the time is changed. The good leaders always seek new and innovative styles of doing their jobs. Their adaptive attitude makes them versatile and helps them in tackling the situation. They recognize very easily that when they have to continue with a similar path and when to bring a change in that path (Emotional Intelligence, 2010).
“Adaptability is not imitation. It means a power of resistance and assimilation”-Mahatma Gandhi
As Mahatma Gandhi said, Leaders never let their feelings to block their journeys, they remain very passionate towards their goals. For example, when one strategy does not work in the business context, then there is always a new technique. Therefore, a leader should be open-minded and eager to adopt new changes (Connors, 2018).
Since Goleman defined the term “Emotional Intelligence”, it relates to high willing power of a leader to adopt new ideas and become more passionate to accomplish their desires. It links to a lot of good things including academic, organizational, and better relationships of a person (Goldsmith, 2009). In a business setting, companies tend to employee those individuals who have leadership skills, high IQ level, and high Emotional Intelligence factor. They believe that is an individual is lacking emotional intelligence, then proper training would help them in growing with understanding the emotions of other people (Lang, 2018). Emotional intelligence cannot be taught, rather it can be learned with dedication and motivation. It becomes important to teach emotional intelligence not only to the employees but also to the students. According to Harvard Business Review Asserts, to whom emotional intelligence be taught, that person should be committed and loyal towards the plan for the particular outcome (Lang, 2018).
Delphine Nelis, a scientist and his colleagues studied and trained 40 students of a college for six months to find out, what should be the impact of teaching emotional intelligence. After his study, he published a book named “Personality and Individual Differences.” They divided the students into two equal groups. Half of the group attended some classes of emotional intelligence for two-and-half-an-hour for total four weeks to improve their understanding in this field. Rest of the students did not take the training (Goldsmith, 2009).
The classes include some discussions role plays as business meetings and readings. The students maintain a diary in which they write about their daily goals, learnings and their impact. The central idea was to extend their thinking ability about expressing and analyzing the criteria on their own. After the time period of six months, both the groups were tested, and the results were very surprising. The group of students who got training classes on emotional intelligence show a significant rise in the ability to recognize and manage their own feelings as well as the feelings of others. It made the researchers and scientists very clear that, if the short-term learning can bring this much of difference and long-term learning can be a positive asset to them for educating new leaders about different aspects of their life (Goldsmith, 2018).
Another way to learn emotional intelligence is through mirror neurons. This practice helps to have a similar mental level to that person who suffers a problem or in a bad situation of stress and anxiety. Consequently, the participant experiences the same level of emotions and movements of the other. Moreover, this technique makes people aware of the feelings of the other and help in making everyone emotionally aware (McClellan, Levitt, DiClementi, 2017).
Emotional Intelligence is a way to understand, manage, and achieve success. All human beings are not the same, similarly, not everyone is born with a high level of IQ and Emotional Intelligence. As proved above, it can be learned with a peace of mind and eagerness to become an effective leader (Murphy, 2016). Some people learn these traits from their experience, and some have in their genes. Those individuals who are the true leader, everyone identifies them very quickly. There are some signs that everyone can use to identify a dignified leader. First, they handle all the criticism alone without anxiety and blaming anyone else. If a person has self-awareness, then he can easily handle all his emotions and situations without showing to anyone. They simply ask questions to themselves like “I need to figure out exactly what went wrong” (Murphy, 2016). Second, they are very good listeners. They acquire this ability that makes them calm while hearing to anyone without any interpretation and reaction. They easily understand the emotions of the people around them and give time to everyone for expressing their views completely. They possess high inter-personal skills.
People with high emotional intelligence never waste their valuable time in proving themselves right in those tasks where they are wrong. They apologize to everyone if they commit a mistake. They are very honest and always learn from their mistakes and lead others by examples. This also indicates their ability to open-minded. They always listen to the person until that person finishes without giving any judgement to them (Murphy, 2016). Effective leaders use the strategy to blend thinking and feelings. They recognize the needs of the situations and make decisions either in rational form or in cognitive form. Hence, the balance of emotions and mentality ensures better decisions for both the leaders and the followers (Emotionally Intelligent Leadership, 2017).
Emotional Intelligence and Effective Leadership are deeply interconnected and are tremendously significant values in modern society. Both focus on minimizing negative attitudes and promotes a positive attitude to the educational and organizational climates. This report shows that there are many factors that comprise the Emotional Intelligence, which further linked to leadership effectiveness. It is concluded that Emotional Intelligence helps in understanding the emotions of people, self-control, passion, curiosity, and management. In addition, it creates loyalty and motivation that is important in business.
