Media Outlet: HR Monthly, Article by Muffy Churches
The debate still rages as to whether great leaders are born or made, but it appears it may be a bit of both.
In his classic book ‘Outliers, the Story Of Success’ Malcolm Gladwell suggested that our genetically provided IQ, functions as a differentiator for success up to a score of about 115, but past that point other attributes begin to play a more significant role.
Common to all of us and independent of our IQ score, exists a bucketful of personal traits that may be deployed and/or developed to generate what we consider to be greatness in a leader.
If we wade through the bountiful avalanche of research and data on the topic, the superstar of all of these traits looks to be EQ. This isn’t surprising given the fact that we know successful businesses are based on successful relationships and that emotional intelligence is the primary skill known to generate effective engagements.
By definition EQ is the ability to recognise, understand, and most importantly objectively manage emotions in both self and others to create a desired outcome.
We’ve long known that the capability can be developed, and that many organisations mandate EQ training, but how do leaders then translate this learned skill into real-time application? What does it look like and where lies the value?
Leaders with skilled EQ:
• Have a heightened capacity to recognise emotional states, continually scanning the interactive climate of self and group
• Proactively choose to diffuse and ease the tense situations that waste time, bruise valuable relationships and are generally counter-productive
• Have a deepened sense of self-awareness, empathy and emotional agility
• Have an awareness of and take personal responsibility for their defensive emotions, avoiding finger pointing and blame
• Work to identify, acknowledge, and accept their personal conflict triggers and are practiced at managing them immediately bypassing the predictable inefficiencies of personal conflict and reactions that inflame
• Have the ability to transform these reactions in the moment, to responses of a more constructive nature, shifting to empathy perhaps or curiosity
• Train themselves to anticipate rough water in vital meetings and create a strategic plan for how to stay afloat, objective, and in control, while helping others do the same
• Have a tactical effect on discussions and on the quality of results that follow
By comparison, leaders ill equipped in this space can find themselves slaves to their gut reactions, often knee-jerking with regret into irritable diatribes, burning bridges, and defeating the common goal at hand. Leaders exercising EQ, serve to tether interactions to a focus on solution and productive results. They build positive interaction dynamics, the very framework supporting successful business outcomes and one of the hallmarks of great leadership.
Muffy Churches is a Sydney-based speaker, executive coach, leadership trainer, and director of Beyond Focal Point, www.muffychurches.com
