The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

In this highly competitive world, Emotional Intelligence in leadership has become one of the most differentiating attributes. It involves understanding one’s emotions and feelings and thereby solving problems. This skill holds immense value in organisations as a leader with Emotional Intelligence (EI) is more likely to be valued and respected by the team members. Infact, as per latest reports, Emotional intelligence has a 58% influence on job performance, and 90% of top performing employees have high Emotional intelligence (EI).

This states the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in the workplace. But how does Emotional Intelligence in leadership arena works?  To understand this, let’s delve into the blog and understand its intricacies. 

Unfolding Major Facets of Emotional Intelligence: How to Develop it? 

There are 4 major components and ways to develop Emotional Intelligence. They are as follows: 

• Self-awareness: It refers to the ability to recognize and understand one’s own strengths, weaknesses, values, emotions and feelings. This is the first and critical step to ace Emotional Intelligence in leadership arena.  Without being aware of your own feelings and set of values and strengths, you cannot move a step forward toward getting into someone else’s shoes and understanding their feelings. Self awareness nonetheless is required to achieve success and excel in every part of the job. 

• Self-regulation: It simply means to manage one’s own emotions, behaviours,  thoughts in a way that is well constructive and aligns with the long-term goals. This itself is a challenge for many and can take a long time. But once you master it by making umpteen attempts in various circumstances, you can easily take a leap to develop Emotional Intelligence in leadership arena, slowly and steadily. Remember, this is a vital stage and might take years to develop and excel at it. 

  Social Awareness: Here comes the best part and the most critical part that can set you apart from other leaders – the ability to get into other’s shoes and understand their emotions, feelings and needs that usually nobody pays attention to. This can be challenging at first, but as and when you dive deeper into their story and problems, you may get a clear idea and understanding on how and why they are experiencing a particular type of emotion. Once you get a clear insight into their behaviour and overall personality of an individual, you can then  empathise, provide proper solutions and thereby ace in developing Emotional Intelligence in Leadership arena. 

  •Relationship Management: Once you learn how to understand someone else’s feelings and emotions and tackle the situation as a leader, the next step is to strengthen bonds with effective communication and manage conflicts at the workplace at ease. For instance, you are a manager and have taken your time out to understand a few team members in terms of their behaviour, feelings and emotions during conflicts. Now, to maintain the relationship and to avoid further conflicts, you keep following up with them and ask about their well-being like a friendly leader. By doing so, they will feel secure and happy to work with you. 

  Thus, developing and excelling with emotional management skills is not impossible, but challenging. To accelerate your growth as a leader, Emotional Intelligence is a must-have skill that every leader must strive to gain expertise in. 

  Emotional Intelligence in Leadership: Unveiling its Importance 

  In today’s ever-changing space, every leader has leadership skills but not Emotional Intelligence (EI). A leader who excels at understanding his/her team is more likely to keep this team satisfied at work, no matter who stringent the work deadlines are. Following are the some of the reasons why it is helpful in leading a team or an organisation: 

  • Effective Communication: Crystal clear communication is necessary from both leader and team member’s end. Without effectively communicating the goals, vision and the areas of improvement, no task can be completed with clarity of purpose. Thus, a leader must clearly communicate the work requirements, deadlines and most importantly purpose and end goal of a particular project. With this, if a leader has a clear picture of all his team members, in terms of their strength, weaknesses and emotions, it becomes easier for him to divide the task accordingly and maximise productivity within the team. 

  • Conflict Management: Managing conflicts is an art and every leader has their own way to manage it. However, leaders who are highly emotional and intelligent know the best way to deal with them – staying calm and composed during such difficult situations. They know how to deliver constructive feedback and highlight errors without hurting the emotions and feelings of their team members. On the other hand, they also know how to diplomatically answer the higher authorities in a thoughtful way. 

  • Decision-Making: One of the important benefits of having Emotional Intelligence in Leadership arena is that it helps the leaders to make informed decisions, in terms of allocating the work, setting right deadlines and setting the pace of the project. How? As leaders with high emotional intelligence know their team members well as to how well they can perform in a particular job, how much time a particular individual will take to complete a job and a lot more. Thus, by considering emotions, strengths and weaknesses of team members, decisions can be made in a simple and easy way. 

  Hence, there are ample benefits of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership. To learn how you can become a thriving leader in Industry 4.0, you must enroll in Post Graduate Certificate Programme in Executive General Management (EGMP) – IIM Tiruchirappalli. To know more about this course, connect here.