Leading Self
Leadership and Your Emotions
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, you will be introduced to the importance and influence of emotions, especially as they affect how people lead and how people work.
This chapter will help you:
- Identify the connection and relationship between leadership development and emotions.
- Catagorize emotional intelligence competencies.
- Discover how emotions affect attitudes and behaviours at work.
Leadership Development and Emotions
In the previous chapter, you were introduced to several characteristics and styles of leadership. Competencies are often used to describe those attributes which are most desirable for leaders in almost any industry or profession.
However, these styles should not be developed in isolation and at various times they are used in conjunction with other competencies. Over the past decade, there has been an upward trend in understanding the role, influence, and application of different intelligence. Most likely, you are familiar with the intelligence quotient (IQ). There are many more than this and some scholars would argue there are as many as nine different types of intelligences.
Some would argue there are as many as nine different types of intelligence. These range from visual, mathematical, linguistic, and kinesthetic. Although these are mostly related to how the individual relates to the external world, there is one which directly relates to the effectiveness of leadership development and application. Both as interpersonal (relationships between people) and intrapersonal (awareness of something within oneself). Emotional intelligence would be such an example.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) can be summarized as the ability to recognize and manage one’s own emotions as well as recognize and manage the emotions of others. Figure 1 is an example of a common matrix for emotional intelligence. The left side of the diagram pertains to becoming more self-aware while the right side would pertain to becoming other-aware. This diagram illustrates that before a leader can begin managing emotions, one must first become aware or recognize emotions.
This figure also illustrates that fundamentally, recognizing emotions either in yourself or in others, is only the first step in becoming an effective leader. The next task is to begin regulating how those emotions affect not only personal outcomes but the outcomes of initiatives within teams or organizations.
Recognizing your emotions is the ability to accurately assess your own emotions in the context of any situation and understand how those emotions inform your attitudes and actions. This would be described by some authors as becoming more self-aware.
Managing emotions includes active and passive responses. If you choose not to act on your emotions that is still an exercise in emotional management. Managing your emotions is also not about you burying them down inside yourself once you notice them. At the heart of managing your emotions is your abi