The Power of Emotional Intelligence
The fundamental task of a leader is to create good feelings in those they lead. Therefore the primary job of a leader is based in emotions. The primary tool of great leadership is emotions.
Understanding the power of positive emotions in the workplace separates the best leaders in both tangible and intangible outcomes including business results, retention of talent, morale, motication, and commitment to the cause.
Primal leadership as used in this book has two meanings:
- It comes first
- It is the most important
The limbic system of the brain (the system that manages emotions) has what is referred to as an “open loop” design: we rely on connection with other people for our own emotional stability.
Scientists describe the open loop as “interpersonal limbic regulation,” whereby one person transmits signals that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, and even immune function inside the body of some one else.
Laughter is an exceptionally good way to transfer emotion through the open loop system. In comparisson to smiling laugher is much harder to fake making it an effective sign of friendship or alliance. Laughing is the fastest way to align emotional state. Laught does not always need to be based on a joke. A study showed that a laugh more often came as a friendly reply to a remark like “nice to me”.
How easily we pick up emotions from other is based on how expressive their face, voice, and gestures are at conveying emotion. Great leaders are especially adept at transmitting emotions.
Stress hormones that are secreted when a person is upset take hours to be reabsorbed. This is why its so hard to “leave work at home” or let go of a bad day at work.
People who are upset have a harder time reading emotions accurately. This decreases their ability to empathise and drastically reduces their social skills.
Feeling good improves mental efficency, this makes people better at understanding information and using complex judgements and improves flexible thinking.
Research shows that humor like a well timed joke or a playful laugh can stimulate creativity, open lines of communication, ehance a sense of connection and trust and make work more fun.
Employees who feel more upbeat will go the extra mile at work, but their is actually a study that claims a direct relationship between them: for every 1 percent improvement in service climate, there is a 2% increase in revenue.
Resonant Leadership
When a leader fails to understand or empathise with the emotions of a group the create dissonance and send neadlessly upsetting messages.
Developing emotional intelligence skills helps avoid dissonance.
There skills in emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship managment. These are vital skills for resonant leadership.
Self-aware leaders are attuned with their own emotional state. They understand that how they feel and how their feelings can affect their performance. Instead of letting anger build up and impact their work, they can preempt these feelings and understand what is causing it and how to do something constructive with it.
The Neroanatomy of Leadership
A study that tracked leadership paths over two years after an interview showed that outstanding leaders/executives got the interviewer to laugh with them twice as often as average executives.
McClelland proposes a new way for hiring or promoting the best people for a job, instead of looking at technical skills, IQ, resumes, or personality, McClelland proposes identifing people who are already outstanding performers at the role and comparing them to the average performers. This analysis allows you to distinguish competencies that the best performers share.
McClelland compared the best leaders with average leaders and found four competencies as the unique strengths of the high performance team:
- The ability to take initivite
- Skills in collaboration and team work
- The ability to lead teams
- The drive to achieve results
There are four domains of Emotional Intelligence as well, these four domains are broken down into 18 competencies. These competencies are not innate talents but learned abilities.
Self-Awareness
One of the most telling signs (but also least visible) is the prpensity for self reflection and thoughtfulness. Self-aware people find quite time by themselves for thinking things over rather than reacting impulsively.
What keeps us motivated and moving towards goals is our mind reminding us how satisfied we will be when we accomplish them.
Passion for work is important it means that our left prefrontal cortext is pumping out a good stream of feelings (chemicals?), this quiets feelings of frustration or worriy that might prevent us from continuing work.
It can be appropriate to make decisions with intution. While these may not be based in data they attuning our feelings helps us find meaning in data which may support better decisions. Intuition works best when it can be supplemented with other kinds of data.
How gut feelings work: every day you spend working in a domain your brain is continually learning decision rules in the background. When face with a decision the brain silently filteres these decision rules and comes up with the best one. This is done in the emotional centers of the brain without any internal dialog with our logical half. The amygdala then informs of us of the decision through circuitry extending into the gastrointestinal tract yielding a “gut feeling”.
Self-Management
After self-awareness–understanding one’s emotion and purpose–comes self-managment the drive to achieve one’s goals.
When we are upset or anxious there is increased activity in the amygdala an right prefrontal areas of our brain. This activity causes us to fix our attention on what is causing the negative emotions (obsessing about it). When we create good emotions the left prefrontal area inhibits the amygdala from allowing us to fixate on distress.
Self-management is an inner converstation that frees us from being prisioners of our feelings.
This is vital because emotional intelligence is so contagious–especially from leaders. A leaders first step needs to be good hygene of their own emotions so they don’t transfer negative emotions to the group.
When two people meet their is a tug-of-war game between the two amygdalas that creates either resonance or dissonance. The person with the stronger emotional self-management tends to influence the connection better.
By staying in control of their feelings and impulses, they create an environment of trust, comfort and fairness that trickles down from leader to followers.
Social Awareness
Empathy is the key component of social awareness. Empathy means considering employees’ feelings into thoughtful considerations and making decisions that consider those feelings.
Empathy makes resonance possible, lacking empathy creates dissonance in leaders.
When a leader can understand other people’s feelings and perspectives they access emotional guidance that can keep resonances on track.
Of all the factors within the control of a company, tuned-out dissonant leadership are the main reason that talent leaves.
Relationship Management
Relationship management is the most visible EI competency. It consists of persuasion, conflict-management and collaborations skils. The skills boil down to handling other people’s emotions.
The act of handling peoples emotions well begins with authenticity: acting from one’s genuine feelings.
Relationship management is not just friendliness for friendlinesses sake. It is purposeful in moving people in the right direction.
The Leadership Repertoir
There are six styles of leadership that the best leaders use a blend of. Great leaders are strong in a number of these styles.
The Visionary Leader
A visionary leader articulates where a group is going but not how to get there this allows the group freedom in innovating, experimenting and taking calculated risks.
Visionary leaders can help retain the most valued employees by creating resonance between an employee and the companies values, goals and mission.
Of the six styles of leadership research shows that visionary leadership is the most effective.
Visionary leaders understand that distributing knowledge is a key to success and the openly share knowledge.
A visionary style can have a negative effect when working in a team of experts who are more experienced than the leader and view the leaders vision as out of alignment with the agenda at hand.
Coaching style
The coaching style involves having deep conversations with employees that go beyond short-term goals and focus on the persons life including long term aspirations, dreams, life goals and career objectives.
The coaching style establishes trust with a leader by the leader demonstrating a genuine interest in people rather than just seeing people as tools to get a job done.
Coaching works best with people who have initiative and motivation. On the other hand coaching is ineffective with people who lack direction or motivation. Coaching can also be ineffective when the leader lacks expertise or the sensitivty required for coaching.
A good coach should always be asking “is this about my goals or theirs?” to ensure they don’t create disonance by forgetting about the person’s goals and ambitions.
Affiliative style
Affiliative leaders tend to place a high emphesis on employees feelings, often putting more emphesis on emotions that completing tasks. These leaders focus on promoting harmony, fostering friendly interactions and nurturing personal reslationships. Affiliative leaders value downtime from the working lifecycle which they use to build emontional capital that can be used when the pressure is on.
The affiliative style should not be used in isolation. It is not good enough to create a friendly work environment. If this style is not supplemented with styles that involve more feedback poor performance may go uncorrected and employees may view mediocracy as acceptable.
Democratic style
The democratic style is a good supplement to the visionary style. While a leader can set a vision, often a democraic approach can surface ideas on how to achieve that vision and generate fresh ideas for implementing the vision.
When overused the democratic style can lead to decision paralysis and too many meetings. Concensus is not always possible and sometimes leaders need to use other leadership techniques to break deadlock.
Dissonant leadership styles
Pacesetting
More often than not pacesetting can poison a teams environment by adding to much pressure on employees. The more pressure employees feel the more anxiety it provokes. Moderate pressue and moderate stress are good, but when the pressure leads to anxiety it can be debilitating.
Pacesetting can be an effective strategy but it requires the team to be self-motivated, highly-competent, and need little direction.
Pacesetting leaders are often motivated not by exteranl rewards, but their own standards of excellence. If employees are not similarly motivated it can create dissonance. Often leaders who are pacesetters lack collabrative and communciation skills.
Pacesetting can work well when coupled with other techniques. Especially techniques that create a large emotional capital.
A trend is technical superstars get promoted but have little interest in the parts of leadership that will support their pacesetting.
Commanding
Commanding leaders need “to be angry with the right person, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reason.” – Aristotle
In a labour market where it’s easy for employees to get equivalent jobs, employees with bad bosses are four times more likely to leave than those who appreciate their bosses.
“People join companies and leave manager.” – Mrcus Buckingham of the Gallup Organization.
The more styles of leadership a leader can deploy the better the outcomes. Leaders who have mastered four or more (especially of the resonance-building styles) foster drastically better climate and business perforance.
When filling leadership position is pays to find a leader who has master four or more of the leadership styles.
Becoming a Resonant Leader
It can be hard for leaders to get accurate feedback about how they are doing as a leader because employees maybe afraid to give candid feedback. This means leaders have to be active about seeking feedback as well as able to perform accurate self-analysis.
The CEO disease describes the phenomenon where unpleasant information is withheld from high-level leaders. This can happen when employees feer the wrath of the leader or don’t want to give bad news. This is particularly prevalant with commanding leaders.
Most people tend to overestimate their abilities; however, the poorest performers tend to overestimate their abilities by the greatest margin. Research shows that the higher the level of an executive the more likely they are to overestimate their leadership competencies and they are more likely to overestimate by larger margins.
Some leaders don’t solicit feedback, and employees don’t provide feedback because there is a belief that leaders cannot change. This has been disproved.
$60 billion a year is spent on training in the North America, but the effects of training do not last. There is a honeymoon effect where people are excited to practice what they’ve learned shortly after the training, but lose focus afterwards. People learn what they want to learn and retain what they want to retain. Even if you master a topic for a test you will likely forget it soon afterwards. The half life for knowledge learned in an MBA is about six weeks.
With intentional effort, motivation and an emotional commitment from participants, new leadership skills can be built in a lasting way.
Skills based in the limbic areas of the brain are best learned through motivation, dedicated practice and feedback. Skills based in the neocortex (which governs analytics and technical ability) can be learned and comprehended quickly. The design of the neocortex makes it highly efficent at learning and expanding on ideas. This understanding can happen after just a single reading (or hearing). The limbic brain on the other hand is much slower–especially when relearning an existing habit.
When learning new leadership skills we are building in the limbic system. If the right training techniques are used training can alter the regulatory centers of the brain for negative and positive emotions. Mindfulness was taught to R&D scientists who were complaining about stress, and after eight weeks the scientist reported noticably less stress and felt like they had more crativity and enthusiasm about their work. Additionally, their brains had shifted, there was less activity in their right prefrontal areas (which generate distressing emotions) and more activity in the left where optimistic feelings are generated.
Building emotional intelligence happens only with motivation and concentrated effort.