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Art of Leadership Blog

What Makes a Great Leader?

2/15/2012

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According to Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence distinguishes great leaders from merely good ones. He says that when a group of senior managers had the following key capabilities of emotional intelligence, their divisions outperformed earnings goals by 20%. These capabilities include:

  • Self-awareness - the ability to know one’s own strengths, weaknesses, values and impacts on others
  • Self-regulation - the ability to control or redirect disruptive moods or impulses
  • Motivation - wanting to achieve something for its own sake
  • Empathy - the ability to understand other people’s emotions
  • Social Skills - building rapport and relationships with others to be able to move them in desired directions

Goleman says we are all born with certain levels of emotional intelligence, but we can strengthen these abilities through practice and persistence. The first three skills in emotional intelligence are self-management tools, while the last two are how people interact with others.

Goleman says that out of leaders with similar technical skills emotional intelligence was the skill that set them apart. It was their ability to deal and manage people, relate to them, create rapport with them, and motivate themselves as well as their employees that really created success. 

It was also their knowledge of themselves, their values and what makes them tick as well as their ability to regulate strong emotions in a way that balances things out.

I do agree with the author that people skills are a key component of the effectiveness of a leader as I believe the hallmark of a good leader is drawing people into your vision.

So where are you on the emotional intelligence scale? Are there any of the five skills listed above that you need to work on? If so what steps can you take in order to enhance that skill?

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Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs Cont’d

1/5/2012

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Although Steve Jobs was legendary in many ways for his creativity, innovation, hard work, and dedication he could also be a hard leader to work for, opinionated and sometimes mean to the people around him. In short he was a human being with both strengths and weaknesses. 

From Walter Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs” here are some leadership lessons that Steve Jobs in my opinion could have learned:

1. Emotional Intelligence - from the biography on Steve Jobs  it seems like he had a hard time managing his emotions. He would either burst out in anger or be distant and emotionless. Either way of reacting to emotional situations can be destructive and hard to deal with for the people around him. Emotionally intelligent people can manage their emotions as well as gauge the emotional context of others which can be a great way to relate to others in an organization.

2. Empathy - Steve Jobs had a hard time being empathetic with others. He would be in his “Reality Distortion Field” and have an idea of how things could be without taking into account how others felt about it. In this way he sometimes pushed people to be better than they thought they could, but he often pushed people away as well. Empathy plays a strong role in understanding other people and creating rapport and trust with them which is key in building lasting and strong relationships.

3.  Creating an environment where people feel valued - in the book Steve Jobs was portrayed as someone who would yell at others, invoke fear in them, and communicate directly that he thought people’s ideas or products were stupid. A good leadership lesson is to treat people with respect which in turn inspires them to want to be better. Steve Jobs could have learned this lesson a bit better.

Steve Jobs had so many good qualities and yet had some key leadership traits that could have been enhanced. Overall history is already writing about him as a genius and a legend overshadowing the lessons he needed to still learn, but as a leader in your organization you can learn from his strengths as well as his weaknesses.

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    Monica Thakrar

    Monica Thakrar has over 18 years experience in business focused mainly on strategy, change management, leadership development, training and coaching resulting in successful implementations of large scale transformation programs.  

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