How to be an Emotionally Intelligent Leader: 7 Key Insights

Tips to start applying the most solid and effective type of leadership to our lives.

Leading is more than just creating the right conditions for team members to work hard. The logic of controlling workers to meet minimum standards has become totally obsolete for a simple reason; it focuses on individual work, rather than on the main thing in these cases: the relational processes of a group of people.

That is why emotional leadership is relevant.. Instead of being based only on the fulfillment of tasks according to objective criteria, emotionally intelligent leaders work to make teams function as a unit in which everyone understands the meaning of what one does and what others do. At the end of the day, getting to work in an organization does not stop us from being human, and that matters.

In this article we will see a series of key ideas that enhance emotional leadership applied to business, sports or any other field in which teamwork is required.

Keys to being an emotionally intelligent leader

It is increasingly clear that in the world of organizations, those who lead best always take into account the emotional facet always take into account the emotional facet of themselves and others.. Fortunately, gone are the days when being a leader seemed to be synonymous with commanding and enforcing rules.

For better and for worse, guiding teams towards goals is no longer about reaching written objectives, but about taking into account the real objectives and needs of individuals and groups (or organizational departments).

On the other hand, it is also evident that emotional leadership is not applied following the theoretical instructions of a book or manual, but that getting it right requires practice and training. However, the fundamentals of this type of leadership can be summarized in simple ideas so that from them we have some notions of what to do. These basic fundamentals are, broadly speaking, the following.

1. Prioritize assertiveness

There are people who try to lead by letting, in general, the people they are in charge of detect and solve their own problems in terms of productivity and work dynamics. While this does not sound far-fetched if you only work with certain highly specialized and highly skilled professional profiles, it is often a mistake. Not everyone has such a proactive attitude by default, and even less so when it comes to delivering bad news.and even less so when it comes to delivering bad news.

That is why it must be clear that in most cases it is the leaders who must bring up any problem they detect, even though this may generate some uncomfortable moments until a solution is found. Avoiding these moments when talking to a team or an employee about things to improve will only cause problems to pile up.

2. Avoid inconsistencies in communication

In organizations, communication establishes how all the people and teams that make up the organization should coordinate. Therefore, it is crucial that there is no inconsistency or contradiction in what is said, which requires putting ourselves in the place of others and interpreting what is communicated by putting ourselves in their place.

An error in this aspect can cause dozens of people to work on what they should not or in a way they should not, which generates tremendous damage to the whole. We must also take into account word-of-mouth communication and the fact that, when faced with two versions of the same fact, people tend to stick with the one that is the best, people tend to keep the one with the most positive consequences for them..

3. Knowing how to set the limit of informal communication

Emotionally intelligent leaders distinguish themselves by connecting with the people in their charge taking into account their needs, beliefs and motivations, but that does not mean that they should pretend to be everyone's friend. In fact, pretending to do so only generates discomfort: overreaching can be seen as an abuse of power.

4. Know how to eliminate unnecessary protocols

An organization cannot be an accumulation of initiatives that look good on paper but do not make sense to anyone and do not provide any practical advantage. For this reason, it is good to pay attention to those joint weekly routines which, according to the team members' point of view, do not make sense in order to, knowing this, decide whether their usefulness should be better explained, decide whether to explain their usefulness better, readjust their format or eliminate them altogether..

5. Transmitting the organization's values

Any organization is governed by a set of values, even if there is no PR manual document created expressly to establish what they are. For this reason, care must be taken that these values are transmitted through all communication channels.The values of a team or organization can be seen both through joint actions and through the image and the aesthetic component that define the team or organization.

6. Do not obsess about mistakes

Mistakes cannot be a taboo either for the leader or for the people he/she supervises and dynamizes. Otherwise, a culture of idealization and concealment of imperfections will be promoted, which will damage the progress of the teams as time goes by.

In addition, encouraging the communication of problems and mistakes makes it possible to create useful diagnostics that will prevent the chain of events that led to the mistake from continuing to negatively affect the group.

7. Get used to learning constantly

Emotional leadership works with people, but also with theoretical and practical contents of all kinds that must be learned as the organization or team goes through the stages of its development. That is why emotionally intelligent leaders must maintain an extremely flexible attitude with regard to learning.. However, always bearing in mind the feasibility of learning certain things and the opportunity costs involved in training in any competency.

How to train in this area?

As we have seen, emotional leadership is much more than following a series of perfectly specified steps on a day-to-day basis and waiting for them to bear fruit without further ado. It is up to the individual to drive positive changes in a team, guided by the right knowledge.

That is why it is important to gain quality theoretical and practical experience to deepen the art of being an emotionally intelligent leader. The Specialization Course in Emotional Leadership of the Institut de Formació Contínua-IL3 (Universitat de Barcelona) is a good way to acquire the fundamental tools to learn how to promote and energize teams and organizations in the best possible way.

The course, which consists of 3 ECTS credits and starts in Barcelona on October 19, 2018 (ending on November 10 of the same year), has the participation of leadership experts who are dedicated to it in the professional field and is designed to be a practical experience in which individual, team and organizational leadership tools are internalized and perfected. To learn more about this training program, you can click on this link.

On the other hand, any process of improving one's leadership requires frequent practice. Therefore, it is important to surround oneself with the right people and not to waste our skills in order to get the best out of our work teams. Only by learning from the mistakes we have made and coming into contact with everything that makes an organization a complex system can we grasp the dynamics to be applied in each case.