"In those fields I have studied, Emotional Intelligence is much more powerful than IQ in determining who emerges as a leader."
Warren Bennis "On Becoming a Leader"

Yep, it’s the latest bandwagon to jump on – throw out Transformational Leadership and Situational Leadership, they’re ‘old hat’ … you don’t need them anymore. Emotionally Intelligent Leadership is the new kid on the block …

Just what you need, right – yet another leadership model?

Well, actually, here at the CAEI, we agree with you. We’re less interested in defining (yet again) what makes a great leader; what we’re more interested in is: What stops you being a great leader?

We believe most people have the propensity to act consistently with emotional intelligence, just as we believe most people have the potential to be a good leader. A view shared by Robert Scott, Senior Manager of Learning and Development at Skandia, "We have 2,000 potential leaders working here."

But how can we have this belief that most people have this potential?

When we ask delegates on our training courses to name the qualities of someone who has influenced them greatly, or who they have experienced as a true leader, the majority will cite things like “He believed in me”, “She values each person’s contribution”, “She’s got a real belief and conviction”, “He always follows through – does what he says he will do”, etc.

The qualities are all about the attitudes of the leaders and the value they place on their people (also on themselves – it’s difficult to truly value others if you don’t value yourself). These are usually a mirror of the qualities by which the delegates themselves would like to be known for their own leadership – their own leadership values.

And the great news is that, as most of us can develop these attitudes, so most of us can be good leaders! In fact, I would go as far as to say that being a good leader requires emotional intelligence, and being emotionally intelligent means that you will demonstrate good leadership – i.e. emotional intelligence and good leadership are mutually perpetuating, like one of Escher’s drawings!

The important thing here is that whichever leadership model you subscribe to, emotional intelligence is going to be what makes the difference, because EI is present within every model of leadership that we have seen. Why? Because emotional intelligence is about self management and relationship management, and these are of course essential skills of a good leader and represented in various ways, with various labels, across the different models.

So what do we mean by ‘self management’ skills? Amongst other things, our self management skills enable us to:

be self-motivating
deal with setbacks
manage our moods
handle stress

In the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire co-designed by our founding director Tim Sparrow, we measure self management with the following scales:

Emotional Resilience – I bounce back from pressure and disappointment
Personal Power – I am in control of my own destiny
Goal Directedness – I know what I want, and move towards that
Flexibility – I willingly change course if things aren’t working out
Personal Openness and Connectedness – I am open and share myself with others, and so make good connections with other people
Invitation to Trust – I am known, and consistent, and can therefore be trusted by others

So how would we recognise these in a good leader? We would see someone who:

handles their stress
has a ‘can do’ attitude
knows where they are heading
adapts to changing conditions
is human and contactful
has integrity

So lets take a similar look at our relationship management skills. Amongst other things, these enable us to:

help others to motivate themselves
lead and develop others
confront others
facilitate relationships between other people.

The same questionnaire measures these relationship management skills through these scales:

Trust – I am able to trust others, while keeping myself safe
Balanced Optimism – I am optimistic, and at the same time, realistic
Emotional Expression and Control – I am free to express my emotions and in charge of when and how I do
Conflict Handling – I am assertive, and handle conflict effectively
Interdependence – I can choose when to be independent, and when to be a team player

So how would we recognise these in a good leader? We would see someone who:

trusts others to run with things and to do a good job
believes most things are achievable and will usually work out well in the long run
expresses themselves clearly and openly in any situation
looks for the win-win solution in conflict situations
is their own person, whilst seeing themselves as an equal with the rest of the team

Because we all have these skills to varying degrees, and all these skills are developable with the right interventions, then we can develop any or all aspects should we choose to do so.

So what is the ‘right’ intervention?

Developing Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

Underpinning all these self management and relationship management skills, are some crucial attitudes. If these attitudes are not adopted it will not be possible to act with emotional intelligence, and therefore in our view, will be difficult to be a good, effective leader.

The most important attitudes are those towards ourselves and other people in general. Having an unconditional acceptance of self and of others are the two primary requisite attitudes for emotional intelligence.

Let’s take a look at ‘self acceptance’ first.

This links with the traditional view of what makes a good leader – someone who has a strong sense of self – belief in their own uniqueness, ideas and abilities, who is able to perceive a vision, who believes in that vision and in their capability of leading others towards that vision, and who is confident in doing what needs to be done to make this vision a reality.

The attitudes we are looking at here are self esteem which is our attitude towards our being, and our self-confidence, which is our attitude towards our doing.

To develop acceptance of self you need to gain a good idea about who you are – for example knowing and being comfortable with your likes, dislikes, strengths, vulnerabilities, preferences, temperament, feelings and needs. This is also linked closely with another of the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire scales, that of Accurate Self Assessment – the more you can come to accept yourself, the more objective you will be in identifying your own strengths and weaknesses.

Through the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire we are able to help people identify their current level of self acceptance, or Self Regard as we call it, and to raise this if this is needed (which you may be surprised to know is the case the majority of the time even in those who appear to be confident leaders).

But the other fundamental attitude which is only now being recognised through the advent of emotional intelligence is that of being able to accept others. Why should this be the case? Why should we accept others, when all we want them to do is to follow us?!

Well, first, let me ask you this question. Why should anyone follow you?

In today’s working environment there is so much more accountability and awareness of what should be expected of our leaders. And if you want me to follow you, and to believe in your vision, I’ll probably need some convincing!

So how, as a leader, can we go about convincing others that our way is the best way?

To gain anyone’s buy-in to our ideas or wishes, we need to get their emotional engagement. This means we need to understand how someone is feeling about a given situation so that we can be sure they are comfortable with what is being asked of them, and so that we can help them move forward with commitment. If we try to coerce or be directive, yes we’ll achieve short term results, but the likelihood is that the hard sell won’t have been swallowed and we’ll need to push for the same thing again, and again, further down the line. Emotions are powerful things. Like it or not, emotions are involved in every single decision and action we take. If we don’t acknowledge their importance within us, and within the people we live and work with, then we’re missing a trick. The challenge even in this enlightened age is still the word ‘emotion’ – many people would still rather just sweep emotions under the carpet!

So how can we go about understanding the emotions of others? The attitude we are looking at here is acceptance of others, or as we refer to it, Regard for Others.

To develop Regard for Others you need to gain a good idea about who they are – knowing and being comfortable with their likes, dislikes, strengths, vulnerabilities, preferences, temperament, feelings and needs. The more you can seek to understand another, the easier you will find it to know them and to accept them. This in turn will build rapport in your relationship which will lead to the trust that is needed for someone to share how they are really feeling, and to ultimately entrust themselves to your leadership.

Whereas if you are low in your regard for others you will tend to come across as judgmental, critical, blaming, rejecting, mistrustful and disregarding of others. This behaviour will make it difficult for you to be accurately aware of others and their feelings, and therefore means that you will enjoy little influence in gaining their emotional commitment.

Again, through the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire we are able to help people identify how highly they regard others, and to raise this if this is needed.

Now that we understand the importance of accepting ourselves and others when it comes to leadership, there is one final aspect of emotional intelligence that will enable us to continually build on this acceptance. These are the Awareness scales. The more we can understand ourselves, and be in tune with our own thoughts and feelings, the greater our self acceptance will become. We can develop this through the Self Awareness scale. Equally, the greater awareness of others, and what they may be thinking and feeling at any time, the easier we will find it to increase our acceptance of others, however different they may be from us. This is another vital leadership goal in this age of diversity and inclusion. We can develop our empathy through the Awareness of Others scale. Raising our awareness of self and of others will in turn help us develop the self management and relationship management skills that we identified earlier.

There are a number of EI qualities that perhaps on the surface seem to have more significance than others in leadership such as Flexibility, Personal Power and Goal Directedness – but ultimately they are all important as all of the EI scales on the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire are inter-linked.

But still, most importantly, when developing leaders in business, we need to start by helping people to develop their Self Regard, to value themselves and their own capabilities as a leader, and to then understand how their Regard for Others will impact on people’s willingness to follow them. This is the uniqueness of our approach to leadership development.

Our emotional intelligence is the key factor that impacts our ability to be an inspirational leader. EI is a combination of skills, attitudes and habits that we can develop to improve our performance and our relationships with others. EI is about how we manage our personality.

So for us there is no great mystery about ‘what makes a good leader?’ As we discussed at the beginning of this article, what matters is identifying the interferences that get in the way of you being a good leader. Undertaking an EI development programme with the CAEI will lead you to the answers.

© Amanda Knight 2005
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

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Principle No. 1
We are each of us in control of, and responsible for,
our actions.

This one comes first because it is key: without it the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. But it is a tough one because it gives each of us individual responsibility – the buck stops here. No matter how awful the circumstances (think of Sophie’s Choice) we still have choices over what we do and don’t do, and are responsible for the ways we exercise those choices. No wonder people are reluctant to accept this principle, and come up with endless ingenious cop-outs.

“The woman gave me the apple and I did eat.”

“I couldn’t help it – I was so angry.”

“It was the drink talking.”

“You made me.”

“I couldn’t help myself.”

© Tim Sparrow 2005
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

1. We are each of us in control of and responsible for our actions.

2. No one else can control our feelings.

3. People are different: they experience the world differently; they feel different things; they want different things.

4. However you are, and they are, is OK.
Though this does not mean that whatever you and they do is necessarily OK.

5. Feelings and behaviour are separate.
Being in touch with our feelings does not mean being out of control of ourselves and our behaviour.

6. Feelings are self-justified, to be accepted and important.

7. Change is possible.

8. All people have a natural tendency towards growth and health.

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To be able to make use of the concept of emotional intelligence in practice, you need to be able to measure it. There are now a number of EI profiling tools in the market place: so how do you select the one that’s right for any particular occasion and any particular business?

There are three things you need to consider when looking at which EI profiling tool to choose:

The difficulties inherent in measuring Emotional Intelligence;
The history of EI measurement – how it has evolved;
What you are going to use the measurement for.

This is a big subject and we shall look at it in two parts: the first two of these topics this month, and next month the requirements of EI measures for different purposes, and a summary of our conclusions.

Difficulties in measuring EI
First and foremost, what do we mean by Emotional Intelligence? Here’s the first problem. There are as many definitions of EI as there are EI measurement tools, and different test designers represent different schools of thought.

Our view is that the chief determinants of EI are attitudinal. We believe that most people have the potential capacity to act in an emotionally intelligent way, although a lot of the time we do not. A very different view underlies the academic studies of the psychology of intelligence which see Emotional Intelligence as an ability or capacity (a skill or competence), whether it is practised or not.

The distinction has significant consequences for the process of measurement. If you are trying to measure an ability, you can set a series of test questions, mark them as right or wrong, and extrapolate from these answers to grade people’s ability, as IQ tests do, and as some EI measures, such as the MSCEIT, do.

But if you are trying to measure or predict how people behave, you need to work out what it is that affects their tendency to behave in a particular way. In other words you need to assess attitudes as well as competencies. For example The EQMap from QMetrics has a section entitled “Values and Attitudes”, whereas Dan Goleman’s measure marketed by the Hay Group, is called the ECI-360º or Emotional Competence Inventory, and does not address values and attitudes as elements of EI.

The other EI measures which are aimed at predicting behaviour rather than measuring capacity are those measures which are based around personality, seeing personality and emotional intelligence as closely interrelated.

The presupposition here is that emotional intelligence is relatively fixed and unchanging, since personality is derived from what is constant in people’s behaviour over time. We, on the other hand, see all the different aspects of emotional intelligence as being changeable and developable, not fixed.

We find relevant and helpful here the model devised by Timothy Gallwey in his Inner Game books, beginning with the Inner Game of Tennis:

P = p – i
Performance = potential – interference

We believe that most people have the potential to behave with emotional intelligence, but that for much of the time we do not, because of our interferences – internal interferences mostly resulting from false beliefs and limiting habits adopted (for what were then good reasons) in childhood, and retained, unwittingly, in adulthood. The process of enabling someone to develop their emotional intelligence therefore consists in helping them to identify and dismantle these interferences.

So, for us, emotional intelligence is not a synonym for personality; it is about how we manage our personality.

Another particular difficulty with measuring emotional intelligence is ‘self awareness’. Self awareness is the key attribute underpinning our emotional intelligence. The more aware we are of what is going on inside of us in emotional and hormonal terms, knowing what we need to do about that, and then doing it, the more in control of our behaviours we can become. This directly impacts on our ability to self manage, and on our awareness of others, what’s going on for them, and how effectively, therefore, we can manage our relationships with them.

This is shown in our model of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is derived from two of the nine ways (so far researched) in which we can be intelligent – known as our Multiple Intelligences, as identified by the Harvard educational psychologist Howard Gardner and his team. These two intelligences are: our Intrapersonal and our Interpersonal Intelligence. (Our Intrapersonal Intelligence is how well we tend to be aware in the moment of what is going on for us at a feeling level, how well we know ourselves and therefore what we need to do about our feeling state, and the extent to which we carry that out. Our Interpersonal Intelligence is how well we tend to be aware in the moment of what is going on for others at a feeling level, how well we understand how other people work and therefore what we need to do about their feeling state, and the extent to which we carry that out).

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© Tim Sparrow 2005
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

Early career
Amanda’s route to becoming one of the country’s first qualified EI consultants started out indirectly with a career in Financial Services Marketing that spanned some 12 years. First working for the Teachers Group, and subsequently Lloyds TSB, she managed complex direct marketing campaigns for a variety of financial products, developed and managed information databases, and led teams of junior marketing executives. Whilst maximising her creative, analytic and organisational abilities, Amanda discovered the fascinating world of personal development through attending in-house leadership and coaching skills development programmes.

Moving on to become a key account manager for an international marketing information services company, she expanded her skills-set managing systems-based projects, and because of her strong ability for root cause analysis, became responsible for the post-sales service of a £1million client account. Amanda came to realise within her troubleshooting role that all service issues at whatever level ultimately stemmed from a ‘people’ issue such as lack of communication, internal politics, or poor leadership.

Discovering the importance of EI
With this realisation, and having recognised her particular skill in understanding and resolving interpersonal issues, Amanda decided to become a self-employed consultant, focusing on the people aspect of change. It was whilst working on a departmental change project for an international laboratory supplies company that she came across emotional intelligence, and the CAEI, whilst searching for a profiling tool that addressed ‘attitude’.

In 2000 she attended the first ever CAEI Certificate in Applied Emotional Intelligence, our post-graduate programme that to this day remains the only in-depth training course in EI of its kind. This was a turning point in Amanda’s career. Realising that her passion lay at the heart of personal change, Amanda has spent the last 5 years researching and exploring the application of emotional intelligence, and how it differs from other constructs, to gain an in-depth understanding of how attitude impacts personal growth and performance, and how this can be developed.

This occurred a year and a half after the battle of Yorktown. A popular misconception is that the Revolutionary War ended at that battle. Though active hostilities had ended, The War continued to drag on. The Continental Army was becoming increasingly rebellious. Many of the troops hadn't been paid in two years. Their promised pensions were not forthcoming. The troops and its officer corps contemplated overthrowing the Continental Congress and installing a military government. On the Ides of March in 1783, dozens of officers, representing every company in the army, met in a log hut to vote on taking this action when George Washington suddenly and unexpectedly walked in. He gave a speech denouncing the rebellious course they were on. But it wasn't the speech that carried the day, it was the Leadership Talk at the end of the speech. Witnesses report that Washington's speech left many officers unconvinced, and when he was finished, there was angry muttering among them. To bolster his case, the general pulled out a letter he recently received from a member of the Continental Congress. As he began reading, his usual confident air gave way to hesitancy. Then, unexpectedly, he drew out a spectacle case from his pocket. Few officers had ever seen him put on spectacles. Usually a severely formal man, he said, in a voice softened with apology: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”

The deep, human, emotional power of that moment electrified the officers. Here was their commander who had never taken a furlough during his eight years of command, who had faced storms of musketry fire, who through his daring and intelligence had kept the Army intact in what most of the world thought was a lost cause, here was George Washington modestly asking his officers to bear with him in an all-too-human failing. It was an astonishing turning point.

As Maj. Samuel Shaw, who was present, put it in his journal, "There was something so natural, so unaffected in this appeal as rendered it superior to the most studied oratory. It forced its way to the heart, and you might see sensibility moisten every eye."

After Washington left the hut, the officers unanimously voted to "continue to have unshaken confidence in the justice of the Congress and their country ...." The result was that the Continental Army disbanded without incident and thereby set in motion the relatively peaceful events that led to the creation of the Constitution.

Source: The Leadership Talk: http://www.actionleadership.com/articles/0017.html

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Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence
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Tel: 01452 741106 Fax: 01452 741520
Email: info@appliedei.co.uk
Web: www.emotionalintelligence.co.uk

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