The enhancement of Emotional Intelligence skills can provide significant value to organizations as they seek ways to help their people develop their leadership competencies. For the past 20 years, the identification and development of leadership competencies as a means of gaining competitive advantage has been a focus of many organizations. Leadership competencies “provide organizations with a way to define in behavioral terms what its leaders need to do to produce the results the organization desires and do so in a way that is consistent with and builds its culture.”(source) Leadership in today’s business world matters more than ever, and while more money is spent seeking to develop leadership competencies, the quality of leadership is still a concern.
Organizations typically have a number of leadership competencies (about eleven to fourteen in my experience) that they believe are important. Of course organizations want their managers and leaders to achieve improvement in as many competencies as possible in each developmental experience they are given, and Emotional Intelligence skill-building offers an approach to help build those competencies.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge from your emotions and the emotions of others so that you can make good decisions about what to say or do, or NOT say or do. The model I use contains five Emotional Intelligence competencies: Emotional Self-Awareness, Emotional Self-Regulations, Emotional Self-Motivation, Empathy, and Nurture Relationships. The first three represent the intra-personal competencies, those things that go on inside of a person that we cannot see. The last two represent the inter-personal competencies, those behaviors and actions that occur between us and other people.
If we take as an example the leadership competency of "making complex decisions," we can show how development of the EI competencies enhances the leadership competency. First we need to look at the behaviors that comprise the competency, then identify the EI competencies that relate to those behaviors and drill down further to the behaviors representing those EI competencies that would help an individual enhance the leadership competency. Following is an example of this relationship:
Article comments
1 - J.P. Whalen
As an organizational development firm, we have lectured on the value of Emotional Intelligence in developing decision makers and leaders. We combine an Emotional Intelligence Assessment with a Performance development program. Emotional Intelligence allows managers, salespeople, and decision makers the tools to persuade and influence others.
2 - Motivational Speaker
Interesting article Byron,
Two questions:
1. Do you use any other approaches to assessing changes in EI other than direct reporting?
2. If you could give one piece of advice to someone prone to emotional overreactions, what would it be?
Once again, thanks for the article,
Steve
3 - Byron Stock
Hi Steve,
Answers to your questions follow.
1. One could use the ESCI 360 as a pre and post measure for individuals. We also use a survey called the Personal and Organizational Quality Assessment pre and post which provides group data. Perhaps the most valuable measure for assessing changes are the stories and examples of how people have used the techniques. Some of these are quantifiable (ex: saved me 4 hours; additional sales of $4 million in one meeting, etc.)
2. Practice the first and second technique I teach in my book SMART EMOTIONS. You can order it on my website
You can contact me directly through my website if you would like to discuss anything else.
Best Regards,
Byron