Throughout this article, we have emphasized the interaction between emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking, passion and reason. We hope we have convinced you that rational thinking involves the emotions and that the two cannot easily be separated. So let’s say you’re convinced. Where does the idea get you? We say it can get you a long way toward becoming a leader rather than simply a manager.
We don’t want to overpromise what emotional intelligence can do for you. You probably shouldn’t expect to acquire some emotional intelligence and suddenly become a “master of the universe” type of leader. But we think if you learn and apply it, you’ll have a chance to become something even better: a leader of teams and organizations that show lasting, positive qualities that can give them an edge in terms of loyalty and commitment, as well as in striving to do the right thing.
If you examine current theories of leadership or descriptions of trusted leaders, it is clear that emotional competencies—and “doing the right thing”—may play at least as important a role as technical competencies and industry knowledge, perhaps even more so. Leadership gurus James Kouzes and Barry Posner argue that there are five keys to success as a leader: (1) modeling how you want others to act on your values, (2) inspiring a shared vision, (3) challenging the usual processes for getting things done by searching for opportunities to innovate, (4) enabling others to act by fostering collaboration and sharing power, and (5) encouraging the heart, by which they mean recognizing the contributions of others and creating a spirit of community. It is difficult to imagine accomplishing these goals without emotional intelligence.
With your enhanced understanding and feel for emotional intelligence, you are probably making your own connections between what you do as a manager and the skills we’ve discussed in this article. Now let’s take a look at how emotional intelligence can help you with six core challenges of management and leadership that we talked about in the Introduction to this article:
- Building Effective Teams
- Planning and Deciding Effectively
- Motivating People
- Communicating a Vision
- Promoting Change
- Creating Effective Interpersonal Relationships