Chances are Emotional Intelligence – or its absence – has already impacted your professional experience. You just may not realize it. In this blog post, our Founder Sara Sweat, talks about the importance of high EQ leaders, the reasons so many top tier executives are striving to grow these skills, & why we sometimes get in our own way.
Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, A Life Curated
Have you ever seen a leader at the top of their game almost lose it all over a simple, avoidable mistake? Or, watch someone brilliant struggle to retain or develop top talent because their communication style was antithetical to their goals? Maybe you’ve even found yourself in a situation where a blind spot in your perspective led to an inaccurate read of a complex problem & wound up creating more work. Chances are – a deficiency of emotional intelligence was to blame.
The concept of Emotional Intelligence isn’t really that old. First coined in the research in 1990, it was 5 years later when a Harvard educated psychologist and then scientific journalist for the New York Times named Daniel Goleman wrote the defining book that introduced the concept to the world.
There are many definitions of the term, but it’s generally regarded as the ability to notice, understand, and manage your own emotions and interpret the emotions of others. It’s also one of the most important skills that allows us to leverage those abilities and build satisfying and sustainable relationships with each other.
In business, high EQ gives leaders an important and almost necessary edge. In a 2019 article for Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman said “The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but…they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions.”
And, it’s rapidly becoming table stakes for early career leaders, as well. To attract top talent, companies voted “Best Workplaces” and “Best Companies to Work For” have a long list of workplace traits that require high EQ leaders to deliver. Themes like respect, effective communication, clear strategic vision, investment in employee wellbeing, & people first culture are expectations for the workplace that team members now bring.
But, for many, especially in fast paced or high tech business settings, the high EQ skill set needed to create these environments isn’t something that’s naturally taught or even immediately valued. Why?
One reason is that for many leaders, emotional intelligence is still considered part of a less valuable or optional expertise called “soft skills”. Coined by the US Army in the late 1960’s, hard skills referred to what was needed to operate heavy machinery and artillery, while soft skills were required for everything else. To accomplish the mission well, a leader needed the right mixture of both – along with a not insignificant amount of heroism.
But, somehow, when the terminology made its way into the corporate world, we lost the nuance and soft skills got de-valued in the shuffle.
It might look something like this. The engineers who programmed through the weekend to get the latest software upgrade ready for launch – hard skills. The HR representatives who convinced them to delay their weekend plans and work longer hours for no extra pay – soft skills. The executives who promised an unrealistic delivery date, didn’t keep a pulse on the human elements of the project, and then came up with the “work through the weekend” idea – heroes. (Are you picking up on the sarcasm? I hope so.)
As organizational psychologist and author, Simon Sinek, says “the nature of work has changed”. We ask much more of our workplace and our leaders than generations past. And, the isolation of the global pandemic and the rise of new virtual interaction platforms have given way to entirely new social constructs for workplace relationships.
We can no longer afford to think of skill sets as being siloed to specific roles or titles. Operating with emotional intelligence is the responsibility of every leader. And, fortunately, it’s in our benefit to do so.
An ever mounting body of research supports that making the investment in developing high EQ leadership skills delivers results in critical areas like employee satisfaction, employee retention, & financial performance.
- Pepsi found that managers with well developed emotional intelligence scores outperformed their peers by 15% – 20% on their annual revenue targets
- At UC Berkeley, a longitudinal study over 40 years found that EQ was four times more effective than IQ at predicting a professor’s success in their given field
- A Gallup study found that employees with high EQ managers were four times less likely to leave the company than those with a low EQ manager
So, while learning a new skill isn’t always easy, the investment in strengthening your emotional intelligence is surely well placed.
