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EI_Not_IQ_Is_The_Key_to_Outstanding_Leadership_Performance
| EI, Not IQ, Is The Key to Outstanding Leadership Performance
Does your executive team work at cross-purposes? Are you
successfully executing your vision? If you are struggling to
take your leadership or your organization to a higher level of
performance, you may be unaware of the power of emotional
competence as a performance differentiator. Several decades of
research in Emotional Intelligence (EI) have demonstrated that
EI is what differentiates outstanding performers from average
performers.
While technical skill and cognitive ability are essential
competency areas for leaders, emotional intelligence has been
shown to be twice as important in outstanding performance as the
other two competencies combined! In fact, 80-90% of the
difference between outstanding and average leaders is linked to
EI. The abilities that drive successful execution of vision –
motivating, guiding, inspiring, listening, persuading, and
creating resonance – are emotional competencies. If you want
exceptional business results, you should assess your EI or your
team’s EI, for these are abilities that can be developed.
What is emotional intelligence? Dr. Daniel Goleman, a thought
leader in the field, defines it as “the capacity for recognizing
our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves,
for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our
relationships.” Thus, emotional competence integrates thought
and emotion.
There are four domains of emotional intelligence -
self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and
relationship management – within which are eighteen competencies
that have been identified as differentiating characteristics in
outstanding performers. Effective relationship management is at
the heart of great leadership but self-awareness is considered
the linchpin for developing the other three domains. Emotionally
intelligent leadership, then, builds up from a foundation of
self-awareness.
Furthermore, a leader’s EI creates a certain culture or work
environment. Organizational research done by the Hay Group,
co-creators of the Emotional Competence Inventory (a 360
assessment of EI), discovered that “EI is carried...like
electricity through wires....the leader’s mood is quite
literally contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably
throughout the business.” Feelings and emotions have a direct
impact on effectiveness, efficiency and ultimately the bottom
line.
Leaders need to understand that their single most important task
is to create resonance. Put another way, they must create a
positive emotional environment that frees the best in people.
Climate, or how employees feel about working in the
organization, accounts for 20-30% of business performance; and
50-70% of how employees perceive their organization’s climate
can be traced to the actions of one person - the leader.
How does this translate to the bottom line? In one study,
experienced partners in a multinational consulting firm were
assessed on the EI competencies plus three others. Those who
scored above the median on 9 or more of the 21 competencies
delivered $1.2 million more profit from their accounts than did
other partners – a 139 percent incremental gain. Another study
of 130 executives found that how well people handled their
emotions determined how much people around them preferred to
deal with them.
Harnessing Emotional Intelligence for High-Performing Teams
With the complexity of problems facing health care leaders,
collaboration and the ability to synthesize divergent points of
view are needed more than ever if we are to solve these
problems. Because most work in organizations today is done by
teams, there is a pressing need to make teams work together
better.
Research has demonstrated the superiority of group
decision-making over that of even the brightest individual in
the group, except when the group lacks harmony or the ability to
cooperate. Then decision-making quality and speed suffer. When
people feel good, they work more effectively, and are more
creative. Common sense tells us that workers who feel upbeat
will go the extra mile to please customers and therefore improve
the bottom line.
To be most effective, the team needs to create emotionally
intelligent norms that support behaviors for building trust,
group identity and group efficacy - three conditions essential
to a team’s effectiveness. Norms that foster group EI involve:
courageously bringing feelings out in the open and dialoguing
about how they affect the team’s work, using humor to defuse
tense situations, the willingness to explore and expose
unhealthy work habits in order to build more effective group
norms and performance, and behaving in ways that build
relationships both inside and outside the team. In self-aware,
self-managing teams, members hold each other accountable for
sticking to norms.
However, it is the leader’s job to instill a sense of
responsibility in each person for the well-being of the team. It
takes a strong emotionally intelligent leader to hold the team
to such responsibility. An emotionally competent leader who is
skilled in creating good feelings can keep cooperation high.
Good team leaders know how to balance the focus on productivity
with attention to members’ relationships and their ability to
connect.
How Do You Build an Emotionally Intelligent Organization?
In addition to specific emotional competencies, there are
certain Rules of Engagement that help to create a resonant,
emotionally intelligent, and effective culture: 1. Discover the
emotional reality of the organization.
2. Slow down in order to speed up – talk to people at all levels
and find out about systems and culture.
3. Start at the top with a bottom-up strategy, engaging all the
representative stakeholders who in any way impact the
patient-customer interface, and learn about what’s working and
what’s not working. Then create a whole-system conversation in
which all the stakeholders who need to be in the conversation
are in the room and talk about what needs to happen to move
things forward.
4. Create a preferred future, with an energizing vision to which
employees can bring their best selves.
5. Sustain emotional intelligence by turning the vision into
action, creating systems or processes that promote emotionally
intelligent behavior.
Matters of emotion are typically dismissed as the “soft” stuff,
yet in reality emotional competence is the “hard” stuff.
Developing EI is well worth the effort, for emotional competence
is what sets the best leaders and the best teams apart from the
rest.
(c) Copyright 2003 Manya Arond-Thomas All Rights Reserved.
About the author:
Manya Arond-Thomas, M.D., a principal of Encompass Health,
coaches physicians, healthcare executives, and teams aspiring to
build competence in the skills required to lead organizations in
turbulent times. Contact her at (734) 480-1932 or
Manya@EncompassHealth.com. Subscribe to Emotional Intelligence
at Work mailto:manya_list@aweber.com
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