The unintelligent emotional leader.

You probably have heard about Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) as Daniel Goleman published his famous book in 1995 and positioned as the array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. The subject has since developed itself in three main areas: the trait model, the mixed model, and the ability model.

As it was associated with leadership performance, we run to measure how much emotional intelligent we are. Peter Salovey and John Mayer defined that emotional intelligence is actually our inability on certain emotions, how we discovered it, how we used it, understand it to manage.

As we lived in a world where showing lack of emotional control was a signal of weakens, we were forced to accept that having a high EQ is a signal of power. But let me give you another perspective. Emotional intelligence is not demanded everywhere, if there is such an emotional intelligence needed. I mean, do we need really to control our emotions?

Imagine very technical workers like plumbers, electrician, mechanics, essential workers and so on. Do they need to have a high emotional intelligence quote or a high technical/pragmatic problem-solving skill? There is not simple answer for this question. The point is how much you care about emotions.

If emotional intelligence is built to better know you, how much you take care about your emotions become the main stream. Are you hiding your emotions on a daily basis? Or openly showing them when fill in awkward situations where you need to be vulnerable? And the main question is, how do you feel and accept your emotions? Another day I got a completely another perspective of grief, by listening a podcast. 

Since grief is a natural reaction to a loss, we judge people saying that a certain person, or ourselves are suffering for a long time. But what if we see grief from the love perspective? As a sign that we love that person so much, and our lost of missing love shouldn't be forgotten. And showing love is beautiful. If you look from this eyes, grief became a love emotion.

There is no correlation between High emotional intelligence, to low technical intelligence and vice-versa. Some of the biggest successful people like Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos score low in EQ tests. They have very low emotional intelligence level, but very competent on execution. And they were extremely assertive and passionate on what they do.

 The Dark side of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side.

In a 2014 article Adam Grant, in his article he mentioned that when people mastered emotional intelligence, they use emotions to break peoples heart and influence in a manipulative way.  

“When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.”says Adam.

That points for me to another level. The unintelligent unemotional leader. This will define a leader that doesn’t care about emotions, either self or from others, are not smart and relationships are not important. And guess what, we find a lot of leaders out there where the focus is hitting their goals above all. The manipulating art of them can make them a goal dictator oriented leader.

EQ is the ability to perceive you, not the intention to use your emotional knowledge on advantage over others. Cognitive ability or how smart you are, is one dimension of intelligence, where EQ is pointing to how intelligently you show you are smarting manipulating your emotions.

"Leaders that mastered emotions can rob us the capacity of cognitive reasoning", says Adam again.

The stupidity of hidden emotions

Dissimulate, is the word for hide your emotions, feelings, or intentions. Emotions are part of our societal relationship with other humans and is what makes us humans. Robots don’t have emotions; they may have programed reactions on certain situations (so far…) but are not able to express emotions as we know.

I like to use the Stupidity Level of Acceptance (SLA). The SLA is a level you tolerate stupid things in life until it crosses the line. The stupid boss, the stupid neighbour, the stupid coworker, and so on. The stupid you. All of us do stupid things time to time since we are not perfect machines.

The issue escalates when the acceptance level is over. We burn out or explode, our emotions pop up on the anger, fear, and drive bad intentions in our minds. And if you have never crossed your SLA level you are not human.

Why do you believe we have high level of burn outs, stressed people, teenager suicide rates, loneliness, and other symptoms? How much emotions are we trying to hide until our own SLA level is crossed? You guess.

The positive intelligence

Shirzad Chamine has come recently with the concept of Positive Intelligence (PQ). Shirzad defines that our two brains, one that makes you to thrive and the other to survive are in constant battle. It’s like you little angel and big devil talking in your ears. And yes, the Devil has 5x more power than the Angel. 

Let me put his definition from his website for better explanation, and I have no interest or commission on his job, just promoting something I believe, since I’ve been through it.

The Survive Region: Your Inner Saboteurs

Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions when you handle life’s challenges. They exist in the brainstem, limbic system, and parts of the left brain. They produce much of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, shame, guilt, frustration, and mind chatter. These negative emotions are only helpful for a second as they alert you to dangers or issues. However, staying in these emotions hurts your ability to see clearly and choose the most impactful response.

The Thrive Region: Your Inner Sage

Your Sage lives in an entirely different region of your brain, the middle prefrontal cortex, “empathy circuitry”, and parts of the right brain. It generates positive emotions while handling life’s challenges. These include empathy, compassion, gratitude, curiosity, joy of creativity, and calm, clear-headed laser-focused action. This region is wired for creativity and big picture awareness of what is important and the best course of action.

Activating this region results in release of endorphins that counter the negative impacts of stress-induced cortisol.

The PQ approach focus more in dominate your saboteurs and boosting your inner sage. We do have a master saboteur called the Judge. And we judge people, the environment and us. The judge causes much of our disappointment, anger, regret, guilt, shame and anxiety.

When we are judging our selfs we are comparing us with past situations or mistakes and making unrealistic predictions of the future. As consequences we judge others comparing them with our knowledge and assuming a superior or inferior point of view. And to finalize, the whole context and environment we are involved leads us to seek for survival instead recognising the gift or opportunity that has been presented to us.

Because we are Humans!!!

Positive Emotions

I would like to concluded that is fine to show emotions. I remembered recently an interview I did for a candidate in my CEO peer group and at the end, she recognises that I was having some drops in my eyes. I told her, that I felt her situation so intense that my emotions flourish in an act of respect and acknowledgement of her pain. And I was not afraid to tell her that, since that is me. We create a strong and powerfull bond at this moment. Out of nothing, just being honest with my emotions.

You don’t need to feel bad to show some emotions. You are human. And don’t pretend to control it. It’s humanly impossible.

If we take the Plutchik’s emotional wheel there are 7 major emotions that drive our life. Its when we feel Angry, Fearful, Bad, Sad, Disgusted, Surprised and Happy. Digging down on the levels they explode and their combination can come up to 34.000 different emotions. Don’t expect to be intelligent enough to master them.

Emotions are feared and avoided because they are painful. But they gave us very important information about ourselves. They help you to survive. To relate to other people and create relationships that last. It helps you to communicate.

To summarise the usefulness and application of Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, as well as other similar tools.

These golden rules are:

• Learn to attend to your emotions
• Become curious and patient with your emotions
• Talk about them and show your real emotions to others
• Learn to accept having different emotions
• Change your emotions with other emotions

And don’t be afraid to be you. The power of your leadership will be demonstrated easily if you take your emotions as a gift and opportunity to find a better you.

Gustavo Santos