As a society we are obsessed with what a great leader is and we spend copious amounts of time and money researching and practicing behaviours from our heroes. We participate in prestigious global programs, intimately studying successful people, mimicking them and listening for inspiration in their words. All in search of Great Leadership!
And then we head back to the office and continue to experience pockets of high and low engagement, weak culture, areas of high turnover and mediocre performance. We convince ourselves to keep marching forward, because you've got the smarts to manoeuvre through those tunnels. And performance continues to be mediocre. And when we leave the office, we shut off and we stop leading ..... until morning comes.
Since Daniel Goleman helped make Emotional Intelligence famous we have spent two decades trying to figure out what to do with it and how it applies to work, how it impacts humanity. What if we could make it simple, what if we focused on developing the Emotional Quotient (EQ) of our Leader's? Life competencies that don't stop or start at the office door. Leadership skills for work, home and life in general.
I'm not suggesting this is all you need to be Great, to be Successful. IQ is equally as important to leadership success as research from DDI tells us, but IQ doesn't change. EQ on the other hand CAN be developed. Imagine your leadership team practicing high levels of EQ daily. What would that do to culture? and engagement? And we all know high engagement correlates with performance uplift. What if you could develop your workforce to lift their EQ? What would it do to sales and service results? and how would that impact on the customer's experience? Imagine the positive benefits this could have on your wellbeing programs? It may seem I'm positioning Emotional Intelligence as the answer to all organisational problems, for me it's simply a strong foundation for frameworks to be built on.
Strong correlations exist between EQ and performance, engagement and culture. As well competencies like Optimism and Intrinsic Motivation being key driver's for sales performance. I've been honoured to witness first-hand the impact lifting EQ can have on leader and team performance. Join us on this emotional revolution.
For more information, email melina@people-ops.com. Melina Lipkiewicz is an IECL accredited coach, SEI certified and experienced leader with more than two decades building high performing teams
sources: 6seconds.org State of the Heart report 2011 - 2014; 6seconds.org research emotional-intelligence-success; high resolution leadership, ddi