Emotionally intelligent leaders get better results. Here’s how to make sure your business has them

Emotional regulation is a critical skill that enables executives to be great leaders, great peers, and to contribute directly to their organisation’s success. Emotional intelligence — or emotional quotient (EQ) — places self-regulation as a critical skill set for adults, and one that is especially important for leaders.

Behaviour profiling

Consider these two executive behaviour profiles:

Executive #1:

• Has trouble listening and hearing what others in their team, or in meetings with peers, have to say;
• Takes credit for others’ success;
• Is known to lie, or share incomplete information as they seek to build their reputation in the organisation;
• Doesn’t respond well to feedback, especially critical or corrective feedback;
• Is considered somewhat untrustworthy by their team or peers;
• Pays more attention to reputation than results and outcomes; and
• Appears selfish, acting primarily or often in selfish ways.

Executive #2:

• Is very comfortable in their own skin and has no trouble listening well to what others have to say;
• Draws others into their conversations to hear their views;
• Is known to be authentic and operate from positive values;
• Is trusted widely;
• Appreciates all forms of feedback including critical;
• Walks their talk as a consistent style;
• Pays more attention to results and outcomes while managing results and engagement of others; and
• Is known as an effective team player and leader.

The first executive is derailed from normal acceptable leader behaviours. The second is a hallmark example of effective executive leadership; a leader who achieves consistent results with and through others, over time.

It became very clear through my PhD research into authentic leadership that these two clusters of behaviour are real and opposite. The first was easily identified by team members as unethical and inauthentic. Their leader’s behaviours resulted in poor performance on the job and higher turnover, and created pressure on the team around them. The second was readily identified as authentic, ethical, and effective; these leaders created feelings of engagement and higher levels of performance in their team members.

Emotional regulation was a strong variable mediating the authenticity and ethical workplace behaviour of leaders in my study, and in numerous studies since then. The typical model of emotional intelligence involves self-awareness as a pre-condition to emotional regulation.

Regulating emotions involves two key developments

1. Self-awareness

   Knowledge of the executive’s own EQ skills (in this case especially self-awareness and emotion regulation), and what improvements are required.

2. Emotion regulation

   Knowledge of the mechanics of regulating emotions, and practice to build the skills needed to effectively manage the impact of their emotions on their behaviour.

Developing EQ

An effective program for building executive EQ skills would include cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a method where the client is challenged to unpack the process of emotion regulation through conversation about the nature of emotions and their consequences. Agreement about these pathways may be followed by goal setting for self-intervention and change.

Such conversation can be preceded by psychometric assessment of the current behaviours in use, to help align on current performance (thereby building self-awareness). 

The second source of knowledge comes from comprehensive executive development programs targeted at developing specific leadership skills, like emotional intelligence. Such programs typically involve a range of individual and group experiences, and may involve blended learning or hybrid learning, face-to-face, online, intensive, and other modes of learning opportunities.

Theory, principles, and practice are interwoven into the design and leveraged by creating experiential learning opportunities. Sometimes video and feedback may be a part of the design, too.

Let’s look now at the question of design of such a program, aimed at developing regulation of emotions for executives. Ideally and importantly, there will be several basic phases:

The stages of development

1. Inform

   Conduct assessment of the current state of EQ, preferably a clinically sound instrument package, and gather other sources of data about behaviour such as 360-survey information from peers, team members and others directly experienced with the executive’s behaviours.

2. Accept

   Provide a platform for feedback and discussion up to the point of acceptance of the need to change and some understanding of the direction of change by the executive. The typical platform for this is an executive coaching relationship to enable a confidential one-to-one discussion.

3. Develop

   Identify the broad approaches to learning emotional intelligence by: 

   • Presenting information around specific skills;
   • Discussing critical performance elements;
   • Group practice, games, and other in-situ experiences;
   • Individual learning methods including online journaling, reflective exercises, action-learning self-design, scoring and feedback;
   • Group learning and reflection forums, whereby individual exercises can be socialised, and feedback and support given; and
   • Creating a coaching to follow the formal and experiential design sequence. 

4. Provide more scope

   Cover a series of topics, progressing from simple to complex: emotions, identity, and life and emotional management skills.

   Emotions: 

   • Single powerful emotions and how to control their impact on you, others and situations;
   • Clusters and groups of emotions as primary, secondary and instrumental, and our responses to them;
   • Scaling, intervening, and engaging with your emotions as tools rather than things that control the individual, and shifting from subject to object; and
   • Choice theory and practice, moving from automated responses to making choices.

   Identity: 

   • Defining who we are and who we want to be, become and be known for. Setting goals for these developments;
   • Examining the levels of ego and identity development and understanding levels above our current level;
   • Looking at the world from higher levels, engaging in practice in seeing the world from other perspectives; and
   • Developing our emotional control as part of defining who we want to become. Practising exercises in higher level thinking and emotion management.

   Life and emotion management skills: 

   • Securing feedback from others, calibrating emotional engagement, and working on individual and shared personality challenges through engaging with others;
   • Partnering for co-development and practising advanced trust exercises;
   • Embarking on a major project to become your authentic self, and building effective bridges with others; and
   • Learning how to manage derailment.

5. Validate

   Reassess the individuals again, using a 360 survey and a skills-based assessment of EQ, and also provide an individual feedback forum to gauge the growth process. 

6. Celebrate

   Create an opportunity for social wrap up, for example a small social event to celebrate the group’s success with members of any social networks who contributed to the assessments.

This outline simply flags the way forward for a sensitive but powerful process to stimulate change for executives who may need remedial treatment for their emotional intelligence skills.

The cost of failing to address these development needs is paid in poor decision-making, poor team performance and higher turnover in organisations. And it seems obvious individual executives cannot develop their EQ in these areas on their own — they need support.

Hopefully this discussion prompts thoughtful design of an executive development program that is sensitive and yet highly effective across many, if not all, organisations today.