Emotional Intelligence – Accelerating Team Performance
Emotional Intelligence – Accelerating Team Performance
This week’s guest blog from Sonya Law covers the link between emotional intelligence, and a leader’s skill at accelerating team performance.
Recently I attended an event featuring Daniel Goleman leading authority in Emotional Intelligence, who covered Team Performance.
What is a LEADERS ROLE in setting goals in 2021?
- Give people clear goals.
- Free to get there in their own way (Empowerment).
- Immediate feedback – so they can self-correct mid-course.
- Set stretch goals for those that are motivated by Challenge.
There are Six Types of Leadership Styles: Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, Commanding.
People and teams want to be inspired and this comes from Leadership. The Visionary leaders have a strong sense of their own purpose and can articulate shared goals and inspire team spirit. This will be particularly important in attracting Millennials – whom will want to be inspired and work for companies and buy products that ‘make a difference’ and contribute to the greater good of society and the environment will be important in branding and marketing in the future.
An Affiliative leader knows the importance of building social capital and will take time to listen to their people and will implement any change seamlessly; a Coaching style leader will engage regularly in banter with their team and through it builds loyalty and staff retention in organisations. And a Democratic leadership style encourages collaboration which builds commitment which has productivity and innovation benefits.
It is the responsibility of the CEO, Human Resources and Senior Executive Team to use your Culture Survey results and feedback from your people to tailor your recruitment and selection strategy to ensure the leaders you hire close the gap on where the deficit is in your forecasting in 2021.
The last two are defunct from Daniel Goleman’s perspective and are ineffective in inspiring and accelerating Team Performance. Pacesetting leadership style is where the leader is an excellent individual contributor and has a high work output but fails to inspire others. The command and control while effective in the military may not be enough to inspire the next generation of millennials. As baby boomers exit the workforce this will also pave the way for organisations to place emphasis on inclusivity and diversity in workplace culture.
Key in business leaders in 2021 will be Emotional Intelligence, self-awareness – is the foundation the basis for Emotional Intelligence (EQ). It’s a cognitive control that moderates our behavior and interactions with people and enables us to connect, engage and influence people and business outcomes which are essential to people leadership. It also improves executive decision making but it is not everything there is also gut feeling which is the wisdom of your experience. When reaching any executive decision, you probably have relied on one if not all of these things, your gut instinct, data (logical brain) and engaged your emotional intelligence.
So how do you build a Culture of Emotional Intelligence?
- Hire people who have emotional intelligence and Korn Ferry has some good assessment tools and 360-degree feedback.
- Review your people’s emotional intelligence at performance reviews.
- Build it into your culture through learning and development.
- Coach leaders in Emotional Intelligence.
It poses the question:
- Should we hire for technical skills (IQ) or soft skills (EQ) which is more important particularly when we are hiring for technical roles and future leaders?
The answer is both, you all have come across an engineer who is brilliant but unfortunately you can’t put them in front of a customer or client because they lack the people or communication skills (EQ).
So, what’s it worth to you?
Your reputation with your customer and future leadership talent pipeline.
For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.