Selecting and Developing Leaders with Emotional Intelligence

Why are there not more leaders who inspire us, motivate us and make us feel like we can achieve great things? Why are there not more leaders who, when we are with them, we feel a sense of self-confidence, self-worth, and we feel like we ‘belong’? Why are there not more leaders who make us feel good? Despite the fact that we all know the qualities and attributes of effective leaders, the corporate world generally does not select managers based on these criteria.

"Managers may know the work, but inspiring and motivating employees requires another set of skills."

How do employees get promoted into positions of management? There appear to be 3 ways in which most employees join the ranks of management with the most popular being technical skill level.

An engineer once told me, “the day they made me a manager, they lost a brilliant engineer and gained a terrible manager.” How often is this mistake repeated in the corporate world? The new manager may know the work and is, therefore, competent to ‘manage’ the work, but inspiring and motivating employees requires another set of skills and competencies.

Another popular method of choosing a manager is seniority. Once again, the most senior employee may know the business, product, or work, but this does not mean that the senior employee has the skills and competencies to create an engaging, motivating work environment for employees.

The third way managers are chosen is because of a specific relationship with a decision maker, which in the case of relatives is, of course, better known as nepotism. Again, there is no relationship between this method and whether the new manager has the skills to impact on employees in such a way as to improve business results. In fact, with this third method there is the added potential of the new manager not knowing the business well either, which means they could be a terrible manager as well as being a terrible leader — a double threat to organizational productivity and competitiveness.

So, what choices do we have? We can either determine what the foundational skills and competencies are that are required to be an effective leader and use those as criteria upon which to base a hiring decision and/or we can use the same criteria to develop the managers that we have. We can and should do both.

But first, we must have a model of what is required to manage one’s self, one’s relationships with others, and the complex situations and circumstances that make up the contemporary workplace to use as a guide.

"The day they made me a manager, they lost a brilliant engineer and gained a terrible manager."

These foundational skills and competencies are found within the concept of ‘emotional intelligence’ (as measured by one’s Emotional Quotient — EQ) and seem to be separate and apart from intellectual or cognitive intelligence, which we measure by one’s IQ. An interesting fact is that just because you have a high IQ score, it does not mean that you know and understand your own emotions and those of others for greater interpersonal effectiveness.

There are several perspectives on emotional intelligence, but only a few that are based on empirical research. The most researched and useful model of EQ in the world was created originally by Dr. Reuven Bar-On in the early 80’s, and has resulted in the world’s leading assessment tool for EQ, the Emotional Quotient Inventory 2.0 (EQ-i 2.0), published by Multi-Health Systems Inc.

After going online and taking the assessment (about 15 minutes) it is possible to obtain scores, compared against a representative sample of the population, in 5 main areas: Self-Perception, Self- Expression, Interpersonal Relationship, Decision Making, and Stress Management. We can then use this information together with other information and decide whether someone is ready to not just be a manager, but to be an effective leader as well.

Additionally, we can use this information to develop the skills of the managers we have to ensure they are effective leaders who can create a productive, happy, healthy context where employees feel valued, inspired, motivated, and where they feel they can produce their best work.