Hello there to all our wonderful readers.
Welcome to another beautiful Monday and the beginning of another productive week.
I wanted to share today’s daily quote with you.
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“According to recent research and global leadership reports, performance success in leadership is one-third IQ and two-thirds EQ.”
Leadership is a critical topic, especially in today’s world, where modern culture has diluted many things, and digital technology is succeeding in killing our attention spans and taking us farther apart. The world needs stronger, more passionate, focused, and visionary leaders than ever before.
Leadership is all about people.
Without people, leadership is empty. It doesn’t exist.
We lead because people need to be guided and inspired to journey towards a mission and believe in a vision.
My definition of leadership. I see leadership as an organic relationship between a leader, their followers, and the vision, where they are all growing into the vision.
For weeks now, we’ve been talking about leadership on Mondays. We’ve touched on the definition of leadership, the act of leading yourself first and the importance of listening and learning in leadership.
Today, we will briefly explore emotional intelligence, which is not just a principle but the very foundation of effective leadership. It’s a key that unlocks the potential for understanding and managing our own emotions and those of the people around us.
We won’t dwell much on emotional intelligence. Towards the end of last year, I wrote extensively about emotional intelligence and touched on the basic principles of emotional intelligence.
You can start reading about emotional intelligence here (our e-book will be ready soon).
Today, we will revisit emotional intelligence and talk about additional ideas about emotional intelligence from a book I am reading.
Discovering Yourself
A leader must know who they are. And… who they aren’t.
You can’t be everything.
It doesn’t matter how smart or strong you think you are. We’re all built for specific purposes, and our inherent skills and abilities are designed to support our uniqueness.
In leadership, one of the most profound lessons you can learn is the significance of self-discovery.
In emotional intelligence, self-discovery is a central theme that holds other elements together.
If you know yourself, it translates to understanding your strengths, abilities, and your weaknesses.
One big reason why most leaders fail is that they don’t know where their strengths and abilities end. They don’t even know their strengths, so they are busy trying to do everything.
When you discover your strength, you focus on improving it, and when you know your weakness, you try to avoid doing things that expose you more until you’ve patched the weakness or found someone whose strength can complement it.
It’s Easier To Lead Others When You Have Discovered Yourself
Leaders who’ve discovered themselves know how to follow a vision; in leadership, vision is sight.
It’s easier to lead others when you’ve mastered your vision. You’re not blind. You know where you’re headed; those who follow you will not be led astray, and they will be confident in your leadership.
You’re not confused about who you are and where you’re going. Imagine following someone who doesn’t even know who they are or where they are going.
Today, they are here, and tomorrow, they are somewhere else. There’s no solid focus; winds of adversity and challenges can easily move this kind of leader.
Emotional Intelligence Is People’s Skills
“People are more attracted to our people skills than our cognitive skills.”
For many years, people used the intelligence quotient to gauge a person’s leadership skills.
Until recently, we discovered that the intelligence quotient, or cognitive intelligence, is not the ultimate yardstick for measuring leadership abilities–emotional intelligence is.
Experience, degrees, training, and proficiency are qualities that leaders should possess. However, these qualities will not make the leader shine very bright without EQ. People are more attracted to our people skills than our cognitive skills.
We are more endeared to people who know how to listen to us, respect us, carry us along, teach and are patient with us than those who don’t know how to listen to us or come down to our level.
While pursuing degrees, training and experience ensure you build your people skills.
According to recent research and global leadership reports, performance success in leadership is one-third IQ and two-thirds EQ.
The science supports it. We’ve enough research studies to support EQ as the ultimate performance indicator in long-term leadership.
When we study the leadership styles of global leaders who’ve led teams to achieve incredible things, we discover that they all have this one thing in common. They are emotionally intelligent leaders.
It takes more than having many degrees and technical skills to inspire people to follow your vision. More than just that. You must connect with them on a deep emotional level before they can believe in you and follow you.
External Mirrors
Building emotional intelligence requires a lot of determination and courage, as it involves facing our flaws and fears. One of the most practical ways to build EQ is to have external mirrors that reflect yourself without bias. Building EQ takes a lot of determination and courage because we need to face our flaws and fears, and many of us like to hide away from our weaknesses.
One of the most practical ways to build EQ is to have external mirrors that reflect yourself without bias.
Getting feedback from people close to you, those who regularly interact with you, is one effective way to evaluate yourself.
Listen to this wise word from John Ortberg:
“Every one of us needs a few people to tell us the truth about our hearts and souls. We all have weak spots and blind spots that we cannot navigate on our own. We need someone to remind us of our deepest aspirations and values; we need someone to warn us when we may be getting off track. We need someone to help us question our motives and examine our consciences. We need someone to perform spiritual surgery on us when our hearts get hard and our vision gets dim; we need a few Truth-Tellers.”
You need someone in your life who can advise you, talk to you when you’re getting it wrong, and nudge you to take the right path when you’re going astray.
Being ‘unaccountable’ is dangerous in leadership. It means no one around you can tell you the truth or confront you.
Reminds me of a colleague I used to work with in the ICU some years ago.
She was an excellent doctor. Very smart. Knew a lot about critical care. Everybody admired her medical skills, and whenever there was a difficult patient, we knew who to call upon.
On the other hand, patients kept complaining about her attitude towards them. They said she was very insensitive and wouldn’t listen to them. Well, if it were just the patients complaining, we would have been able to patch things up, but colleagues began to complain about her, too.
When people worked with her, they felt they were walking on eggshells and trying always not to say or do things that would make her explode! When upset, angry or when things are not going the way she wants them to go, she will begin to talk and say all sorts of things without restraint or regard for anyone in public, even senior management.
I was close to her and understood her a little bit. There were times I tried to talk to her, but instead of listening, she would start to talk about how people don’t know her worth, or how people around her just want to oppress and take advantage of her, of how she has struggled so hard to get to where she is. She goes on and on and on.
I am not the only one who tried to speak with her.
She was the “I don’t take shit” from anybody type of person.
Many other colleagues also tried to, but she wouldn’t listen, and her attitude was hurting the department; the patients and the top management heard about it, investigated, and, at last, sadly, had to let her go despite her skills and resourcefulness after several panel meetings with her, loads of queries and even counselling (they tried to keep her, she was an intelligent doctor).
No one really understood what she had been through as a person—her past traumas, struggles and what her eyes had seen.
However, if she had been emotionally intelligent, she would have known better to calm down, listen to people, work on herself and become a better person.
Emotional intelligence teaches us that our past mistakes, trauma, and experiences are all building materials for our present and future selves.
Most people might argue for the doctor, saying that unpleasant experiences in her past have shaped who she is.
You may be right. And research has even connected past trauma and experience with people’s degree of emotional intelligence.
However, we must know that we’ve within us the ability to change ourselves if we want to. And past trauma and negative experiences shouldn’t be an excuse for us to lack emotional intelligence.
“The present study showed that childhood trauma was negatively associated with emotional intelligence. This is consistent with previous findings that adolescents with higher levels of childhood trauma have lower emotional intelligence.”
Talking about how past trauma affects emotional intelligence is another extensive topic which we will not be able to explore (yet).
I would like to explore it, though, in future writing.
I will let you know if we ever decide to explore it.
I suggest you read our series on emotional intelligence. You can start reading it here. You’ll learn a lot from it. If you’d like to be notified when our emotional intelligence e-book is ready, subscribe to our Substack newsletter here. It’s free.
Before I finally leave you, we’re looking for a content writer at Carecode Digital Health Hub. If you know anyone who is interested, kindly share the application with them here.
Catch you next week.
Stay inspired.
