Amanda Wildman, Director, Emotionally-i-Fit conducts monthly interviews on the theme of Emotionally Intelligent Leaders. First up is Mel Forbes, CEO Guidant Group
Emotional Intelligence is a combination of attitudes and behaviours that distinguish outstanding performance from average performance. It provides a framework for understanding how you manage yourself to be personally and interpersonally effective. Your emotions are influenced by your attitudes. In particular, your attitude towards yourself and your attitude towards other people. There are 16 dimensions relating to Emotional Intelligence that great leaders will display. In these interviews, we are going to explore how successful leaders demonstrate these EI behaviours in their work.
Our emotions are powerful – they provide us with valuable information if we listen to them.
So why don’t leaders do more to understand their own emotions and other people’s?
In my experience the topic is now getting greater exposure in the boardroom. How to develop the right leadership behaviours in order to improve performance and the emotional engagement of employees is now a very hot topic and rightly so. I do, however, observe that there is still a discomfort in the workplace with talking about emotions, and different cultures will, of course, bring another layer of complexity to this issue.
Empathy is the degree to which a person is in touch with the feelings of others. It is a dimension of emotional intelligence and can have a massive impact on emotional engagement of employees at both an individual level but also at an organisational level. The degree to which a leader is in touch with the feelings of others will be based on how aware they are of themselves - their emotions from a physiology perspective, their feelings, intuitions and to some degree, their thoughts. From an organisational perspective, engagement surveys regularly check and measure how people feel and provide a significant amount of information that assesses this. The challenge with this is that once an organisation has this information, it needs to do something different to make changes, if appropriate, based on what it has learned.
