Leadership Excellence - March 2012 - page 6

EI, however, requires moving beyond
awareness of your emotions. You have
to do something with that awareness.
• Self-management is the capacity to
effectively manage or control emotions
and behavior.
These first two clusters
comprise your
emotional competence
. Jim’s
emotional response to challenges
de-
meaned and threatened others
, instead of
inspiring them to positive action
.
• Social competence
includes
social
awareness
, the capacity to understand
and to be attuned to the emotions of
other individuals or groups of people.
• Relationship management
is the
capacity to induce desirable responses
in others.
The emotional and social compe-
tence domains are highly interrelated.
While
Jim struggled with
emotional competence
,
his lack of
social competence
resulted in
alienated followers ready to sever their
relationship with him.
Developing EI
EI can be developed
. Richard Boyatzis
and his colleagues find that, over two-
to five years, individuals who complet-
ed a competency-based MBA program
greatly increased EI. But how do you
become a more
emotionally intelligent
leader? How can you grow your emo-
tional and social intelligence?
Here are
five steps
drawn from
Boyatzis’
Intentional Change Theory
:
1. Decide what type of leader you
want to be.
Tap into a genuine motiva-
tion to change by envisioning who you
would like to be as a leader, including
articulating
specific leadership behaviors
that you would like to display consis-
tently. You might envision being an
inspiring leader of people, not just an
efficient manager. This discovery and
articulation of the type of leader you
would like to become may be facilitated
by input from others. But
the desire to
change has to come from within you
. What
you are working toward should repre-
sent your personal vision of
the type of
Heart of Leadership
S
MART PEOPLE CAN NOT ONLY FAIL AT
inspiring
and
motivating
their teams,
they can destroy
interpersonal goodwill
.
• Jim Curran, production manager in a
manufacturing company, has been identi-
fied as a high-potential manager. He’s on
the fast track—sponsored to attend the
Executive MBA program at a prestigious
university. Last month his boss, the plant
manager, invited him to attend their execu-
tive leadership retreat. Today, Jim knows
that his crew will need to keep a tight
schedule to meet their deadline. Things seem
to be humming along. Then suddenly Sam
Bundy, the quality control manager, who is
conducting tests on the product, shuts
down the line. Jim knows that the deadline
will be missed as they will need to retool
the line to determine what caused the error.
He explodes in anger, yelling at Sam.
Intimidated, Sam walks away, and his crew
follows. They all go to the plant manager’s
office. Soon the plant manager yanks Jim
into his office and tells him, “You better
shape up or you’re out!” Jim is shocked.
Jim is hijacked by negative emotions
when things don’t go his way, unaware
of the impact of his behavior, oblivious
of what others need from him, and
unable to engage people in finding
solutions—all
classic symptoms of
leaders who lack emotional intelli-
gence—the ability to recognize and reg-
ulate emotions in ourselves and others
.
If business acumen and strategic think-
ing represent the mind of leadership,
emotional intelligence represents the heart
.
Four Clusters of Competency
Several models for developing
emo-
tional and social intelligence
exist. The
model developed by Daniel Goleman
and Richard Boyatzis is organized into
four clusters of competencies
, represent-
ing a set of
learnable capabilities
that
result in outstanding performance.
• Self-awareness
is the capacity for
understanding your
emotions
,
strengths
and
weaknesses
. Self-awareness is key to
outstanding leadership. Demonstrating
leader and person you would like to become
.
2. Assess where you are today rela-
tive to your ideal image or vision of
yourself as a leader.
Self-assess where
you are open and honest about your
current strengths and shortcomings.
Beyond self-assessment, seek feedback
from others to
illuminate potential blind
spots
—things that others see in you, good
or bad, that you can’t see in yourself.
3. Develop a detailed plan for change.
Target areas for improvement in emo-
tional and social intelligence. In what
areas are you most excited about learn-
ing and growing? Select three compe-
tencies that you want to tackle initially
(you can work on other things later).
Your plan should always be targeted
and focused—not just on closing gaps,
but on
leveraging strengths
. By under-
standing and utilizing your strengths,
you can leverage them to close whatev-
er gaps may exist between
the leader you
are today
and
the leader you would like to be
.
4. Experiment with and then practice
new behaviors.
No matter how elabo-
rate your plan for change, if you contin-
ue to do what you have always done,
you will continue to be who you have
always been. To make meaningful
change toward becoming a more emo-
tionally intelligent leader, you have to
do at least some things differently. This
requires experimenting with new
behaviors. You might practice seeking
input from your team. The key is to
learn from those mistakes, adjust your
behavior, and try something else. To
create sustained change, you need to
practice beyond the
point of comfort
where you perform the new behavior
well when you think about it—to the
point of mastery
where you can effec-
tively engage in the targeted behavior
without thinking about it. “Amateurs
practice
until they get it right
. Profession-
als practice
until they can’t get it wrong
.”
5. Enlist the support of others to facil-
itate your development.
Behavioral
change is difficult, especially in isola-
tion. To become an EI leader, you need
to nest your change efforts within a
network of
trusting, supportive relation-
ships
. Turn to people with whom you
have a good relationship, one based on
trust
,
empathy
, and
mutual respect
.
By intentionally developing
EI
, you
respond constructively to challenging
circumstances, inspire and motivate
others authentically, and connect
deeply with people—to engage as a
leader
with the
mind
and
heart
.
LE
Melvin Smith is Faculty Director of Weatherhead Executive
Education, Case Western University, and Diana Bilimoria is
Professor of OB. Visit
ACTION: Develop your emotional intelligence.
L e a d e r s h i p E x c e l l e n c e
M a r c h 2 0 1 2
5
LEADERSHIP
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
E n g a g e w i t h e m o t i o n a l i n t e l l i g e n c e .
by Melvin Smith and Diana Bilimoria
1,2,3,4,5 7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,...22
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