A growing body of research continues to reveal that emotional intelligence (EI) is far more influential in professional success than traditional cognitive intelligence, often referred to as IQ. During The Leadership Challenge Forum 2010, Rosalie Clough and Doug Brown of Dynamic Perspectives facilitated a workshop titled Sustaining The Leadership Challenge with Emotional Intelligence.
At the crux of this seminar, Clough and Brown compared the Emotional Intelligence Skills Assessment (EISA) factors with The Leadership Challenge (TLC) practices. In doing so, they drew parallels to the ongoing TLC work of Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, blending together discussion points of the building blocks for exemplary leadership.
EISA measures factors such as: Perceiving, Managing, Decision Making, Achieving and Influencing. TLC’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® include: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared, Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act and Encourage the Heart.
According to Kouzes and Posner, TLC is about how leaders mobilize members of an organization to get things done. Transforming values into actions and building a climate that enables challenges to evolve into successes are key components of this methodology in practice. These characteristics, behaviors and competencies are essential to effective leadership.
Through tools such as EISA it is believed that opportunities to boost emotional intelligence throughout an organization correlates to overall business performance improvements. Establishing leadership concepts aligned with EI entails the ability to understand, manage and respond to situations based upon one’s own emotions as well as emotional cues of others.
The core elements of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are proven to link directly to organizational outcomes. Studies have confirmed that emotionally intelligent leaders tend to be more effective and successful than their less emotionally intelligent counterparts.
Along with myriad industry thought leaders, several mass media and business publications have covered EI’s positive relationship to operational productivity, market share expansion and numerous other key performance indicators.
Recently, many well-known business leaders have been held up as examples of EI in action. In other highly publicized instances we’ve also seen occasions where an obvious lack of EI contributed to poor perceptions about a company’s leadership and their response to crisis.
Companies that have consistently selected and developed leaders with high EI capacity have shown marked economic impact over their competitors. Emotional intelligence remains a fascinating topic for strategic advantage in the ever-evolving competitive landscape of organizational life.
Article contributed by Kelly Blokdijk, Talent Optimization Coach & Consultant with TalentTalks. Regarded for “Creating a Voice for Talent,” TalentTalks consults with the business community on innovative and customized human resource and organization development initiatives to enhance talent management, talent acquisition, corporate communications and employee engagement programs.
