Emotional Intelligence – EQ – is a relatively recent behavioural model, rising to prominence with Daniel Goleman’s 1995 Book called ‘Emotional Intelligence’.
Emotional Intelligence is increasingly relevant to organizational development and developing people, because the EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people’s behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills, and potential. Emotional Intelligence is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service, and more.
Mapping emotional intelligence to leadership traits
Emotional intelligence capabilities can be directly mapped to specific leadership traits. The following table illustrates this mapping and outlines the corresponding behaviors:
| Competency | Leadership Trait | Behavior |
| Self-awareness | Self-aware | Know their weaknesses and strengths as well as how their behavior affects others |
| Self-regulation | Level-headed
Comfortable with ambiguity |
Stay calm in the midst of turmoil and confusion
Can operate in environments of uncertainty where there are few guideposts |
| Motivation | Persistent | Maintain a positive, focused attitude in pursuing a goal, despite obstacles |
| Empathy | Caring | Empathize with other people’s needs, concerns, and goals |
| Social skill | Humorous
Politically astute |
Know how to interject humor when the situation warrants it
Have a strong sense of their organization’s power structure, and know where to turn for the support and resources they need |
Fortunately, since emotional intelligence is not genetic, strengthening your EI capabilities is possible. You can learn to improve your EI skills through extended practice, feedback from colleagues, and your enthusiasm for making a change.
Contemporary business leadership calls for generous portions of decisiveness, coolness under fire, and results-oriented thinking. It also calls for courage in the face of conflicting demands. The ability to make trade-offs between people, resources, money, and deadlines—often causing short-term pain for the sake of long-term benefit—remains a vital element of effective leadership.
Likewise, leaders must be future-focused; they must know how their group or unit fits into the bigger organizational picture. They must be able to efficiently organize short-term tasks according to long-term priorities.
Perhaps one of the most important responsibilities of today’s leaders is creating the conditions that enable employees to excel. To achieve this aim, the most successful leaders are also the most flexible: they have learned to adapt their leadership style to the situation.
There are now a number of models and questionnaires aimed at measuring Emotional Intelligence, often based on self-report questionnaires. However, this approach has obvious limitations in identifying levels of self-awareness.
The assessment of EI in leadership is complex. The use of simple self-report questionnaires to explore self-awareness has significant limitations. Team Focus approach the topic using a sophisticated variety of approaches including 360 feedback and experiential exercises. This brings the whole concept alive and allows individuals to go beyond their existing knowledge and comfort zones thus producing real impact, growth and change.
