Why Is Emotional Intelligence Important in Leadership?
If you’re a leader, you can’t ignore the role that emotions play in your workplace. If you care about work performance, if you seek an organization that is motivated and effective, emotions must be paid attention to, both yours and those of your employees.
A critical skill that leaders need to harness, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and manage emotions and their implications, whether in yourself or in others.
A leadership scholar, Babson College Professor Scott Taylor is an expert on emotional intelligence. “It has been the primary focus in my work for the last 25 years,” says Taylor, professor of organizational behavior and the Arthur M. Blank Endowed Chair for Values-Based Leadership.
Before entering academia, Taylor worked as a business consultant. He was stunned by the concerning behavior of his clients, particularly at Enron, the infamous energy company plagued by corruption and fraud. “I was blown away by how leaders were out of touch with reality. These were educated, highly successful people,” Taylor says. “I just said it was time to go back to school. I lost patience with corporate America. I just had so much curiosity about how things came to be.”
That curiosity led him to study emotional intelligence. In the following article, Taylor explains the power of emotional intelligence and two of its critical components: self-awareness and empathy.
“There are very few things more important in leadership than emotional intelligence,” Taylor says.
• To better understand, manage, and motivate others, emotional intelligence is essential.
• It deepens the relationship between employees and those who manage them.
• Over the years, studies have shown that it’s an indicator of key workplace outcomes, including job satisfaction and performance.
“Emotional intelligence predicts a battery of outcomes,” Taylor says. “It seems to be the primary significant driver of performance at the individual and team level. More so than personality traits. More so than IQ.”
What makes emotional intelligence in business such a potent leadership tool is the sway it has on relationships. “At the end of the day, leadership is about relationships. It is not about being in a position of authority. We have a lot of people in positions of authority who are disasters,” Taylor says. “It has everything to do with the relationship between leader and follower.”
Emotional intelligence is what builds and strengthens those relationships. A leader can scold an employee or go on a tirade, but such heated exchanges will only produce short-term results. For long-term, optimal performance, emotional intelligence is the tool to use.
In all, emotional intelligence is made of a dozen competencies.
• Those competencies include, among others, adaptability, conflict management, influence, self-control, and having a positive outlook.
• When considering emotional intelligence and leadership, two competencies are particularly crucial. The first of these is empathy, the ability to understand the emotions and perspectives of others.
• The other key competency is self-awareness, which involves not only a knowledge of one’s self but also a recognition of how others perceive you.
The importance of self-awareness in leadership can’t be overstated. Self-awareness, a foundational component of emotional intelligence, is essential to many of the tasks of being a leader, including managing relationships with others and becoming an inspiring coach and mentor. “You won’t get the management without self-awareness,” Taylor says. “Until you become aware, truly aware, you won’t have effective management.
To be truly self-aware isn’t easy, for it involves two types of knowledge about one’s self. The first of these is internal. Leaders need to know their strengths and weaknesses, their values, their motivations, their sense of purpose.
With leaders often subjected to a slew of self-assessment tests such as Myers-Briggs, this internal knowledge can be overemphasized. Leaders can focus on measuring their personal traits and not much else. “We are fostering narcissism,” Taylor says. “It can create a navel-gazing sort of approach to self-awareness.”
By focusing too much internally, leaders can lose sight of the external aspect of self-awareness, which is perceiving how others experience you and your leadership. “Anticipating how others experience you really matters, and it really matters to leadership,” Taylor says. “That part got lost.”
That’s why conducting a 360-degree review, in which employees give feedback about their manager, can be a startling undertaking for some leaders. “Can leaders anticipate accurately how others see them?” Taylor says. “More often than not, they can’t anticipate very well.”
One key ability that can help a leader perceive the feelings of others is empathy.
Empathy is another key component of emotional leadership. Having empathy in leadership motivates workers to be more engaged in their work. “You get the extra mile out of people,” Taylor says. “The performance of the team goes up.”
Examples of empathy in the workplace include listening to employees, taking to heart their feedback, and understanding their perspective. “You are truly understanding their thoughts, feelings, what they’re dealing with,” Taylor says.
“There are very few things more important in leadership than emotional intelligence.”
Scott Taylor, professor of organizational behavior and the Arthur M. Blank Endowed Chair for Values-Based Leadership
Empathy is not simply a matter of being kind. “It is not compassion. It is not sympathy. It often gets conflated,” Taylor says. “Empathy is an awareness of others.”
Younger employees have come to expect this. “If they don’t have an empathic leader, they won’t put up with it,” Taylor says. “They want a leader who understands them as a person.” That’s why leading with empathy has become a critical part of retaining younger employees. “If you want to retain your future, you better have an empathic leader,” Taylor says.
Ultimately, the reason why empathy is important is that it is tied to how well employees will follow their leaders. “Followership is tied to empathy,” Taylor says. “Without followership, there is no leadership.”
Emotional intelligence is like any other skill. To develop its competencies, leaders must work on them. To build self-awareness, for instance, leaders can perform self-reflection, meditate, heed feedback, and take self-assessment tools. To improve empathy, they need to make sure to listen to others and learn to pause and not interrupt.
“You can grow these capabilities,” Taylor says. “It’s like a muscle. The more you work it, the stronger it becomes.”
In learning how to develop emotional intelligence, just one change can make a substantial difference. Taylor worked with a CEO who decided to try not to interrupt his employees when talking with them. “People noticed something was up,” Taylor says. “He was getting better information and people appreciated him a little more.”
Leadership Toolbox: Read about other core leadership skills on Babson Thought & Action.
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