By Amber Colvin, Guest Columnist
Leadership capability gaps have become an overwhelming focus in the broader workforce landscape, and it’s time we prioritize emotional intelligence in professional development.
Four years ago, I sat in the office of the Vice President of Loans Department of a prominent local Detroit credit union. Even if you never walked into his office, you couldn’t miss the quote on his wall by Maya Angelou reading: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
At this point in my career, that was the first time I’d experienced someone in leadership implying the importance of empathy in the workplace. To me, that signified a huge “Wow, this gentleman gets it” moment.
He led his department with that value, and everyone under his leadership expressed that they enjoyed showing up each day, exceeded performance markers, and had a healthy communication channel with him, their boss. These results were not just sound technical skills and business strategy, but also the VP’s empathetic approach to leadership.
To better understand, manage, and inspire people, emotional intelligence serves as a significant driver of job satisfaction and performance at the individual and team level.
According to a Korn Ferry study, only 22% of 155,000 leaders surveyed have strong emotional intelligence, highlighting a considerable capability gap. Another study in 2019 by the Harvard Business Review revealed that leaders who display empathy and emotional intelligence significantly outperform their peers, ranking them in the top 10% of leaders.
These leaders aren’t exceeding their counterparts’ performance by chance, they rank high in soft skill areas like self-awareness, self-control, empathy, and teamwork. The easier it is for you to understand how you are perceived, assess the consequences of your words & actions toward others, connect beyond the technical skill, and diffuse conflict in healthy ways, the easier it will be for a group of people to trust you and be inspired to do their best at work (sending performance scores through the roof.)
Emotionally intelligent traits align with most organizations’ core values and principles already, so training and integration can be viewed as seamless, blending it with existing culture (after all, empathy is an innate human trait). Daniel Goleman, the accredited psychologist who popularized the phrase “emotional intelligence” in 1995, states that there are 12 emotional intelligence competencies, or traits, according to his model. I consult with primarily nonprofits and mission-driven corporations, so I’ve seen my fair share of mission and vision statements over the years.
Here are four common core values I’ve found that match up with some of those competencies: teamwork, positive outlook, adaptability, and inspirational leadership. Do you see how as professionals we instinctively strive to work toward these competencies without even labeling them “emotional intelligence”? Nonetheless, emotional intelligence is learned and learnable, especially through the people we trust to lead our organizations.
Now, while empathy is an important skill we can and should build, I am not at all implying that we spend every waking moment empathizing with our employees, or that harnessing the skill guarantees all-around organizational success, because neither of those are realistically feasible.
An unbalanced approach to emotional intelligence can open the door to being incongruent with equally important soft skills like accountability and communication, when being understanding supersedes the bottom line of an organization.
This is where we can blend logic, strategy, and pattern recognition to be sustainable and “smart” with our empathy skills. Setting psychological boundaries by being compassionate, or caring for others without feeling what they’re feeling, can make all the difference between burning out and holding all parties accountable with grace. Emotional intelligence is not inherently about being nice or kind, it’s meeting your team beyond their deliverables, establishing trust and real followership.
A leader with high standards for professionalism takes advantage of their upskill in emotional intelligence. This leader understands high empathy is a fundamental skill that allows us to develop relationships effectively, increase performance, and drive a healthy work culture.
If an organization strives for commercial success, it should not assume that workplace staff naturally have emotionally intelligent skills, it should intentionally be a part of every leadership training curriculum.
Amber Colvin is the founder & principal consultant of Renew Living Solutions, a boutique consulting firm committed to deeply transforming the workplace experience for professionals. Her firm is dedicated to building strong partnerships that help businesses and organizations remain committed to the health and wellbeing of their workplaces and communities.
