Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Being emotionally intelligent can be very beneficial to everybody in an organization, but it is particularly important for leaders to master this skill.
Being emotionally intelligent helps you to:
- Build and maintain good working relationships
- Recover from challenges and crises, and
- Make tough choices and decisions
Build and maintain good working relationships
Building good working relationships is important for your career. Co-operation and agreement are the glue that holds teams and organizations together; and emotional intelligence is an essential component in maintaining strong working relationships. Solid interpersonal skills and the ability to ‘read’ and build rapport with other people, are valuable characteristics of emotionally intelligent leaders.
Maintaining good working relationships can be challenging, given different working styles, expectations, and perspectives. Having the ability to weigh up challenging behaviors and be open to differences in perception allows for more flexibility of responses, and is aided by emotionally intelligent thinking.
Recover from challenges and crises
Even daily challenges like staff not turning up for work or not completing their tasks on time, can test leaders and managers to stay alert and find solutions. When bigger events happen like, for example, a key worker resigning, or losing an important customer, the ability to remain calm, clear-minded, and solution-focused is a key sign of effectiveness and a measure of emotional intelligence. Resilience, the ability to recover quickly or to remain resourceful during and following unexpected hurdles, grows as a result of developing and practicing emotional intelligence, and is a core skill for leaders.
Let’s consider an example of a leader using emotionally intelligent thinking to manage a situation:
The Chief Executive of an organization was disappointed when he realized he would have to re-structure the organization. He had two options, and the option he had chosen would dismantle an effective way of running their service that he and his team had been very proud of for a long time. However, the decision he had made would also preserve more jobs and prolong the life of the service over the next few years. He described it as having made the ‘right’ decision with his head, but a painful and difficult one for his heart. He wanted his close colleagues to feel positive and supported in the new arrangements. To address this, he took an emotionally intelligent decision to seek some personal coaching to help him come to terms with the decision, so that his incongruence would not show and possibly unsettle his colleagues.
Make tough choices and decisions
Having to let go of prized ideas or ways of working, saying no to what seem like reasonable requests from team members and fielding their resentment, or even deciding among competing priorities are regular occurrences for leaders. High emotional intelligence can take the stress out of such situations where the leader can take them in their stride.
Back to TopBill Phillips and Kevin J Reid
Bill Phillips is an International Facilitator, Trainer, and Team Coach.
- Has successfully coached CEOs, board members, directors, executive teams, and team leaders in public and private companies, NGOs, and UN organizations in 15 countries across four continents
- Is the creator of Future-basing®, a highly potent process for building strategy, vision, and cooperation
- Inspires people to build excellent interpersonal relationships and achieve their goals
In this module, Bill is the instructor for the ‘Leading With Emotional Intelligence’, 'How to Delegate to Your Team', and 'Providing Effective Feedback' lessons.
Kevin Reid is CEO of Personal Skills Training, Senior Coach at Kevin J Reid Coaching, Co-founder and Communications Director of The Counsel.ie, and Lead Collaborator of LeitrimMade.com.
- A consummate and skillful international communications trainer, facilitator, and coach
- Has over 15 years of learning development experience with individuals, teams, and entire organizations
- Has facilitated communications workshops and training across numerous sectors in Ireland, the UK, Europe, America, and Africa
In this module, Kevin is the instructor for the ‘Coaching and Mentoring’ lesson.
