Underpinning Goleman’s six leadership style is his work on emotional intelligence (see Goleman, 1998). This is worth examining as it sets out all the competencies required to be a successful leader.
Goleman’s research into the necessity for emotional intelligence is convincing. First, his investigation into 181 different management competence models drawn from 121 organizations worldwide indicated that 67 per cent of the abilities deemed essential for management competence were emotional competencies. Further research carried out by Hay/McBer looked at data from 40 different corporations to determine the difference in terms of competencies between star performers and average performers. Again emotional competencies were found to be twice as important as skill-based or intellectual competencies.
EMOTIONAL COMPETENCIES FOR LEADERS
Self-awareness
Knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions:
Emotional awareness: recognizing one’s emotions and their effects.
Accurate self-assessment: knowing one’s strengths and limits.
Self-confidence: a strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities.
Self-management
Managing one’s internal states, impulses, and resources:
Self-control: keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
Trustworthiness: maintaining standards of honesty and integrity.
Conscientiousness: taking responsibility for personal performance.
Adaptability: flexibility in handling change.
Achievement orientation: striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence.
Initiative: readiness to act on opportunities.
Social awareness
Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns:
Empathy: sensing others’ feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns.
Organizational awareness: reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.
Service orientation: anticipating, recognizing, and meeting customers’ needs.
Social skills
Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others:
Developing others: sensing others’ development needs and bolstering their abilities.
Leadership: inspiring and guiding individuals and groups.
Influence: wielding effective tactics for persuasion.
Communication: listening openly and sending convincing messages.
Change catalyst: initiating or managing change.
Conflict management: negotiating and resolving disagreements.
Building bonds: nurturing instrumental relationships.
Teamwork and collaboration: working with others toward shared goals. Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.
Goleman defined a comprehensive set of emotional competencies for leaders (see box). He grouped these competencies into four categories:
self-awareness;
self-management;
social awareness;
social skills.
Self-awareness, he says, is at the heart of emotional intelligence. To back this up, Goleman’s research shows that if self-awareness is not present in a leader, the chance of that person being competent in the other three categories is much reduced.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-MANAGEMENT
The managers that we work with often have high drive levels and are also very intelligent. When this combination of characteristics is present in an individual, that individual often experiences a lot of frustration. Other people are either too slow, or too relaxed, or simply ‘not getting it’.
This was crystallized by a very dynamic and successful IT manager whom I worked with recently. When I went through her emotional intelligence feedback with her using HayGroup’s Emotional Competence Inventory, her self-management scores were low, especially in the area of self-control. I asked her how often she felt frustrated in her work. She paused for a moment and then with a sudden realization she said, ‘All the time.’ Up until that point, she had not realized that there was an issue. This had just become a way of life. Others were experiencing her as bad tempered, moody and occasionally bullying. Then we started to talk about strategies for dealing with this.
A brief scan of the competence set will confirm that self-awareness, self-management and social awareness are all competencies that are not necessarily observable. We call this inner leadership. Only the social skills category contains obvious observable behaviours. We call this outer leadership.
In our experience those involved in leading change have to develop especially strong inner leadership because of the emotions arising from their own drive to achieve, coupled with potential resistance from many levels, and the discomfort involved with letting go of old habits. It is a very emotional landscape!
Daniel Goleman says that it is vital that leaders develop emotional competencies. He says:
In the new stripped-down, every-job-counts business climate, these human realities will matter more than ever. Massive change is constant; technical innovations, global competition, and the pressures of institutional investors are ever-escalating forces for flux. As organizations shrink through waves of downsizing, those people who remain are more accountable – and more visible.
Whereas a bully, or a hypersensitive manager, might have gone unnoticed deep in many organizations 10 years ago, he or she is much more visible now.
STOP AND THINK!
Draw a pie chart that represents your own use of Goleman’s six leadership styles. Are you using them in the right proportion? If not, what do you plan to do differently and why? Try this exercise again, but this time use the framework to help someone else to focus on his or her leadership style. Write up the conversation, indicating what insights the exercise provoked.