Category Archives: Emotional Intelligence

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Does It Pay To Be Emotionally Intelligent?

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Does It Pay To Be EI - 1Would you agree with me that the ability to “read” people would be a handy skill to have? According to a recent paper in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, if you’re good at discerning other people’s emotions, you are probably bringing home a bigger paycheck than your emotionally challenged co-workers and colleagues.

Now, I am not suggesting that money is the greatest motivator. In fact, studies have shown that money is a terrible long-term motivator with affects being seen for only the briefest of time. But money (income) does affect our actions and behaviors.

Does It Pay To Be EI - 2Recently, some researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany showed a group of study volunteers a series of images and voice recordings and asked them to identify the emotions being expressed. “On average, the participants succeeded in 77 percent of the cases,” lead author Gerhard Blickle, a psychology professor at the university, said in the press release. “People who succeeded in 87 percent of the cases were considered to be good, and people who succeeded in more than 90 percent of the cases were considered really good. Those below 60 percent, in contrast, were seen as not so good in recognizing emotions.”

Blickle and colleagues also sought information about the careers of their study participants, including basic facts like income along with more subjective information gathered from interviews with people who worked with the participants. Those who scored higher on the emotions task were also rated as more socially skilled by their colleagues and supervisors, and they tended to make more money than people who scored lower on the emotion-reading task.

I believe that the finding makes intuitive sense. People who are more socially adept are usually more adept at navigating the work environment and keeping the “boss” happy. At any rate, this work suggests that it literally pays to be emotionally intelligent.

So what is the leadership lesson from this study?

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Leaders Encourage Vigorous Debate

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Vigorous Debate - 1Great leaders know how to focus on the positive, helpful, edifying and uplifting communication while managing the negative, destructive, decisive and demeaning communication in meetings.

Consider this advice from a seasoned old-timer to a young leader who was still early in his leadership career. It happens to be from the New Testament of the Bible.

“But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them.” 

Titus 3:9-10

Have you ever been in a meeting that digressed and evolved into almost a free-for-all? As a contrast, have you ever been in a team meeting where the leader encouraged good debates and successfully squashed useless ones?

Such well-managed teams tend to finish their meetings with good plans and they do it on time. The participants feel productive and actually like getting together because everyone feels like they were a part of something productive.

But, back to my brief Biblical text. The Apostle Paul (the old-timer) exhorted a pastor (young leader) named Titus to refrain from arguing about peripheral subjects that divided his followers.  And I think that advice is relevant to leadership principles today.

There is a branch of modern communication theory that seems to have grown out of the apostle Paul’s philosophy. In 1968, Sir Charles Geoffrey Vickers, an English lawyer, administrator, writer, and pioneering systems scientist introduced the concept of “appreciative systems”, which later became Appreciative Inquiry (AI). It was really further developed nearly 20 years later at Case Western Reserve University’s department of Organizational Behavior. It started there with an article in 1987 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva. They felt that the overuse of “problem solving” as a model often held back analysis and understanding, focusing on problems and limiting discussion of new organizational models. At its core, AI is positive debate that explores what an organization does well and how it can build on its strengths.

Vigorous Debate - 3As leaders it’s sometimes difficult to limit discussion and keep debates from getting out of control.

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Train up a child…

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I’m the father of three little kids, and we’re just starting school for them. I’ve wondered a bunch lately about the things that they will learn this year, and where they will be successful, where they will struggle, and how I can lead my family through both ends of that spectrum. I’ve wondered how well they will be reading and writing, what sort of social experiences they will have… you get the idea if you are a parent.

I’ve also been thinking lately about the things that my children need to learn: an understanding of football, baiting a fish hook, how (and more importantly, when) to throw a punch, how to safely handle a pocket knife (for my oldest, at least), for a few examples.

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Correlation Between Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

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EI and Leadership Coorelation - 1Emotional Intelligence is a topic that I have covered before here on Leadership Voices. But, it is worthy of some additional coverage because of the major influence it has upon your success throughout life and also due to the the fact that it is a skill that can be learned and developed.

Emotional Intelligence involves going past our limited sight, thought, and understanding. By definition, our best insights are those things that we observe, we receive, we experience and not the things that we generate or produce. Emotional intelligence first requires quieting the clamor of our own thoughts and words in order to become aware of ourselves and aware of those around us.

What is my leadership point here?

The key to emotional intelligence and leadership is the development of the sense of how our persona and our ideas are being received by those that we are leading. Can we agree that most of our communication is non-verbal?

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