The Business Leader and Emotional Intelligence

I cannot stress the importance of emotional intelligence in enabling you and your senior team to grow your business. Why!

Because it is all about helping your teams to achieve above average performance in serving customers to drive business growth

Let me be more explicit and outline here the definition of emotional intelligence.

'the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.'

So breaking this down further I want to help you to understand some of the key mindset and attributes that can be attributed to a person who has a strong emotional intelligent personality.

1. Has a real understanding of self-awareness:The understanding of one's emotions, strengths, weaknesses, and its impact on others is essential for effective leadership. Being humble and having that self awareness is the first step in developing the emotional intelligence to support how your react and motivate your team. This will be tough, as we know the destructive elements of our character that hinders a strong emotional intelligent mindset. But you MUST address the elephant in the room.
2. Creating self-regulation tactics of your emotions:Being able to manage and control one's emotions, especially in high-pressure situations, is super important for making rational decisions and maintaining composure. For example, if you are prone to react on impulse, then devise a tactic to allow you to call a time out, rather that react to the situation. This will ensure that you do not implicate yourself in inflaming or not dealing with the situation in a non professional manner.
3. The importance of developing empathy: Empathy is NOT sympathy. Being able to understand and empathise with the emotions and perspectives of others, including employees, customers, and stakeholders, helps build strong relationships and fosters a positive work environment. This is where your listening and questioning skills come into play. Feeding back what you have heard and asking for clarification that what you have heard is correct, is a powerful way to help the individual establish that they have been heard and understood.
4. Be prepared to communicate often:Effective communication, relationship-building, and conflict resolution skills are critical for a business leader to inspire and lead their team towards common goals. So sitting in an office 99% of the time will not help you to understand the culture and issues in your organisation. Get out and talk informally, and more importantly, squash immediately ANY issues or conflict that will impact that culture that your are creating in the organisation. A motivated, unified and focussed workforce will be the driver for your companies success.
5. Innovation and Adaptability:The ability to have a mindset that is not belligerent and wedded to a point or opinion, (that may be detriment to the performance of the organisation) is super important. Listen to outside advisors, your board, your lieutenants. However there will be a time that sometimes you need to stand your ground, but be prepared to argue that point in a respectful and professional manner. You need to bring people with you, that is the key and essential in today's rapidly evolving and uncertain business landscape.
6. Cultivating internal resilience: Business leaders often face challenges and setbacks, so having resilience to bounce back from failures and setbacks is important for maintaining motivation and momentum. Resilience does not happen overnight, but comes from having great people around you to encourage you and developing strategies and tactics that allow you to feed your spirit and soul in those times. For example meditation, prayer, walks, exercise, a sport, hobby. In other words anything BUT the workplace that will allow your brain to relax and get perspective. Also never forget the business leader superpower to resilience SLEEP!!
7. A mindset to always consider continuous learning and growth: The best leaders recognise the importance of ongoing personal and professional development, CEOs with high emotional intelligence are open to feedback, willing to learn from their experiences, and continuously strive to improve themselves and their leadership skills. Develop those emotional intelligence skills and attributes to be better leader than you were before. But you need to measure it! Our online Leadership 360 product is fantastic on measuring this attribute so that you can track year on your year your progress on this game changer attribute of leadership.

Our online Leadership 360 product has been a game changer in helping leaders to identify the strengths and areas of improvement in this key area. If you want to know more then please reach out on the link here .