By Matt Abbott, President and General Manager – The Sourcery
Each one of us can recall a time when someone in a leadership role — whether he was an immediate supervisor, manager, colleague, or even a business partner — mishandled a situation in spectacular fashion. Regardless of the circumstances, we look to leaders as role models and examples who personify not only the organization they take part in leading, but also the values and core principles of that organization. As leaders ourselves, we must also take this into account when it comes time to act and reflect on those actions.
Just as each person living in our world today is their own individual with a unique set of skills, beliefs, and values, each individual in a leadership role likewise brings his own unique skills and beliefs to the organizations and businesses he serves. By understanding this, we can subsequently understand that while there is no single designated leadership style, but as many leadership styles as there are leaders, we can begin to see a correlation between the values that the best leaders possess and their effectiveness as an individual leader himself.
That correlation between a leader’s values and his effectiveness in a leadership role becomes all the more prominent, however, in those leaders who are able to showcase higher levels of emotional intelligence (EI/EQ). In this article, I will outline how a leader possessing higher EQ grants him the ability to become a more effective leader.
Read the Room
Defined by the Institute for Human Health and Potential as, “the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our emotions,” as well as that to influence the emotions of others, EQ at its core is the awareness and recognition of how emotions drive our behaviors and impact ourselves as well as those around us, both negatively and positively. In my experience, the awareness and recognition of those emotions and their impact begins with a leader’s ability to properly gauge their audience, or, to put it another way, “read the room.”
In being able to properly read the room, the best leaders are thus able to similarly better understand the scenario presented before them. As a result, they can then more easily and more effectively identify and analyze the risks and opportunities of the scenario, as well as generate solutions to the scenarios and follow through on those solutions through action.
For instance, if an organization faces a problem regarding its ability to retain a larger portion of its talented employees, the leaders with higher levels of EQ would not enter this scenario ready to place blame on the employees themselves, whether as individuals or a collective. Rather, they would be able to recognize the emotions felt by both their employees and their team leaders, evaluating them from a 10,000-foot view in order to see the bigger picture of the problem they are facing.
In examples such as this, a leader who historically performs well in moving things forward from point “A” to point “B” may not be the best at reading the room as they only view the issue as a problem in need of a solution. Instead, the best leaders — those with higher EQ levels — can remain goal-oriented on finding a solution while still remaining aware of their company’s or organization’s pulse and using factual data, as well as emotional cues and information from others around them, as crucial factors in formulating decisions.
Metrics Are Only Part of the Equation
Just as the leaders with higher EQ levels can better assess and evaluate situations affecting their organization or those in it from a higher, more objective vantage point, those leaders who possess lower EQ levels tend to be more single-minded insofar as their ability to stay focused on one sole strategy or activity at a time. This can cause leaders with lower EQ levels to become bogged down by factors such as low metrics or under-performing KPIs which, while vital, are rarely (if ever) the root cause of any single organizational issue.
Juxtaposed to this, while leaders with higher EQ levels still regularly use metrics or KPIs to track performance, they also know that metrics and performance data aren’t necessarily the end-all-be-all.
Allow me to clarify with an example: While I and my colleagues at The Sourcery were nearing the end of the first major wave of COVID-19 during last year’s pandemic, almost all of our company’s metrics — and our employees’ KPIs — were deep in the red. I knew that this was not the result of any (or even all) of our employees underperforming; it was due to a number of larger high-level issues impacting our business. Likewise, I knew that our company would continue to suffer unless we acted upon the needs of our employees, so we increased the benefits offered to our employees, regardless of where they were located. We did so knowing that it would cost us more up front, but the cost of retaining our employees posed less risk to the company as a whole than increasing their benefits was. We did this again in early 2021, again with the knowledge that retaining those employees was critical for the business.
I use this example as one case in this scenario because, through reading the room and understanding that metrics and KPIs were only part of the equation and not the underlying issue itself, our company’s leadership was able to formulate their decisions around the understanding and awareness of the deeper root issue: Our employees needed assurance that they would be protected and secure in uncertain times. In coming up with a strategy to offer that security to them, The Sourcery has since gone on to see its highest level of organizational growth at scale since its inception.
When Pointing the Finger, Turn It First on Yourself
Perhaps the most prominent strength of leaders and managers who showcase higher EQ levels is their ability to assess their businesses, as well as themselves and others, in a manner that is both professional and objective. This is because, in doing so, those leaders are able to bestow a portion of their EQ unto others.
Think for a moment about how your business is viewed from the perspective of your employees, managers, or executive team. Chances are that each party inherently views the company in a different way, depending on each party’s specific roles and responsibilities. Those views, too, are likely to change as the organization itself grows and changes as well.
This is not to say that your internal structure should change with the winds or that your leadership style should necessarily be one of bending over backward for every request; however, rules should not get in the way of empathy. If you are able to look at yourself and ask how you can improve as a leader within your organization, without being self-deprecating or dishonest, others will be better equipped to understand where you’re coming from when change happens. In holding yourself accountable to your own words and actions, your employees and colleagues will take note of this and strive to reflect similar behaviors without feeling afraid of or threatened by change.
One way to accomplish this is by putting other leaders at your organization through scenarios to let them learn these skills for themselves. For example, ask them to rank two employees, “A” and “B.” Why do they rank one over the other? Do you both assess those employees’ performances in a similar way? If not, why? From there, ask questions with specific examples that allow the other leader to assess how his behaviors, actions, and words impact others at your company and/or the company itself. Once those other leaders are better apt to assess themselves, they will be better prepared to assess others within your company just as leaders with higher EQ levels are, and remain more accountable to their own assessments.
To put it more simply, if you’re going to point the finger, turn it on yourself first.
