Rowitz On Leadership

If it is true that building relationships is the most important activity of leaders, then it is important to determine what skills are the most critical for building these relationships. We must build these solid relationships both inside and outside the organizations that employ us to use our leadership skills to make our organizations effective in the marketplace if we are businesses or in the community if we are service agencies. Many leadership books talk about the impact of new technology on our work, the processes that drive organizational action, the use of our partners in business or community collaboration, and the measurement and determination of successful and unsuccessful outcomes. Yet, many writers and leaders today talk about the critical nature of emotional intelligence skills in today’s world if our partnerships and our leadership approaches are to be successful.

Although emotional intelligence is not really a new orientation, it has come to the forefront due to the influence of Daniel Goleman and his five-part model for better understanding the importance of emotional intelligence in our leadership work. The five part model includes:

1. Self-awareness or our ability to understand how our emotions affect our decision-making
2. Self regulation or our ability to control our actions as circumstances and the context of our work changes
3. Social skill is our ability to manage our relationships and use our skills to better impact the direction in which our partnerships move
4. Empathy or better understanding others’ feelings
5. Motivation or as Goleman argues being able to achieve our goals

What is unique about our emotional intelligence is that we can learn to control and adapt our emotions over time. IQ does not appear to be able to change in the way that we can change or control our emotions and have a direct impact on the emotions of others. Although we can creatively move our technology forward and change the process by which we do things, it becomes clear that EI helps us in these activities in a ongoing way. Without emotional intelligence skills, we would not be able to accomplish what we do in an efficient and effective manner. Change would not be permanent without these EI skills in play. EI is not only our secret ingredient for the successes we attain as leaders, it is the ingredient that most often makes our success possible.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2012 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.