By Phyllis Ndlovu, founder and CEO of Kisima Psychological Services.
ONE of the reasons why many leaders in South Africa, and globally, do not have healthy or adequate emotional intelligence is that more often than not, people get promoted into leadership positions because they are good at what they do or are subject matter experts, and not because they have proven leadership skills.
So, engineers become operational directors, or accountants become financial directors. Many have to learn leadership skills on the job and emotional intelligence does not necessarily come naturally to them.
Ultimately, leadership is about being a custodian of different elements of an organisation: people, processes and performance, as well as stakeholder relationships. Those without adequate emotional intelligence can compromise the quality of how the organisational ecosystem functions.
Self-regulation for healthy work environments
In the corporate world, emotional intelligence refers to a leader’s ability to self-manage and self-regulate so that they can promote a constructive work environment. When leaders do not adequately manage their responses to the people or occurrences that trigger them, they can have an adverse impact on their corporate environments.
For example, if leaders are triggered by people who over-explain things, but are not aware of this, the way they respond to the over-explainers may not be in a measured or sustainable way and this could undermine the health of those relationships.
Humanising self and others
If leaders are going to navigate different elements of the organisation effectively, they have to show up in a manner that demonstrates they are worthy of their custodianship role. This means they have to engage in a balanced way and create enabling operational environments. As neuroscience shows, such engagement will enable teams to feel humanised and, in turn, those teams will feel invested in shared outcomes and therefore travel more effectively with their leaders.
Leaders with adequate emotional intelligence are also able to make decisions without being clouded by emotion. Corporate environments today are characterised by several competing priorities: everything is due today and people are under constant pressure. It is an acquired skill to recognise the pressure and ask yourself: how do I optimise my decision-making capacity, even when I am constantly under pressure?
Tools for developing emotional intelligence
The starting point for leaders to develop their emotional intelligence is by becoming more self-aware and cognisant of the impact they have on their colleagues.
Self-reflection – generally speaking, we are not socialised to pause and reflect as a society, especially in the corporate world.
Accountability partners – leaders should consider identifying an accountability partner to check in with regularly.
Focus on what you can control – often when we are under pressure, we tend to focus on everything that needs our attention in an attempt to adequately crisis manage.
Leaders should choose the priorities they have full autonomy over and focus on those. In this way, they create efficiencies for themselves and those around them.
We all have finite units of neural energy per day, which is distributed across all of our physical and mental activities, as well as our decision-making capacity and the choices we make.
Setting the tone for others to show up
When leaders adopt some of the above practices and model emotional intelligence for their teams, they set the tone for others to show up, to be invested in their mutual outcomes and, ultimately, emulate the behaviour of their leader.
