Article by: Muffy Churches
Published in The Australian, February 18 2017
Staying competitive alongside the forward march of innovative technology keeps an organisation on its toes, but success in the marketplace is determined by a more human factor: the effectiveness of the relationships leaders create.
Emotional intelligence plays a significant role in the quality of successful organisational engagements. In April 2016 Josh Freedman, co-author of the State of the Heart study and chief executive of Six Seconds, observed, “The bad news is emotional intelligence continues to decline globally. I hypothesise this is due to growing stress and chaos in the world — maybe that’s also why the analysis found that emotional intelligence is essential for top performance.”
Emotional intelligence is about creating graceful engagement — the ability to recognise, understand and most importantly manage our emotions — and can be a significant challenge for leaders at a time when stress levels are high.
With acquisitions and restructures now common, there are expectations for leaders to be increasingly productive in short periods of time, with fewer resources and higher levels of uncertainty. This does not bode well for calm and strategic objectivity in the boardroom, when nerves are frayed and teams fatigued. The result can be a lack of emotional intelligence, unproductive conflict that creates disharmony, lack of trust, and protective withdrawal from contribution and innovation.
Can we develop emotional intelligence? Absolutely. Many organisations mandate its training.
But more important questions are: how do successful leaders translate this skill into real-time application in the boardroom, and what does it look like?
Leaders with emotional intelligence have a heightened capacity to recognise emotional states and continually scan the interactive climate. Aware of their own defensive reactions, they are practised at transforming them, in the moment, to responses of a more constructive nature, shifting to empathy or curiosity. In doing so, they have an effect on the conversation and the results that follow.
Leaders unable to do so find themselves slaves to gut reactions, often acting in a knee jerk way with regret into irritable diatribes, burning bridges, and defeating the common goal. Those without emotional intelligence diminish their capacity to build effective relationships and have a constructive influence on a discussion.
Emotionally intelligent proficient business leaders have a few behavioural traits in common: they take responsibility for their own defensive emotions, with no finger pointing or blame. They 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. They work to identify, acknowledge, and accept their personal conflict triggers and are practised at managing them.
Exercising emotional intelligence in the boardroom serves to tether interactions to focus on solutions, common goals and productive outcomes, bypassing the predictable inefficiencies of personal conflict. It generates a group sense of personal safety, opening the door for collaboration, innovation, and co-operation.
Leaders aiming to achieve positive outcomes in the boardroom focus on a heightened awareness of their own defensive emotions and the effect they have on interaction dynamics. Through emotional intelligence and self-management leaders diffuse and ease the tense situations that waste time, bruise relationships and are counter-productive. Leaders with emotional intelligence build effective relationships, the very framework supporting successful business.
Muffy Churches is a Sydney-based executive coach and director of Beyond Focal Point
