Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Dear Luis,

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to deal with our emotions and comprehend emotions and feelings of others through empathy in order to facilitate relationships, manage stress, handle frustration and overcome all types of obstacles in the daily life and achieve goals and objectives. EI allows us to understand our emotions to handle them in the best way.

But trying not being to much detailed, in my point of view depending of the function of the leader, it's important that cognitive intelligence is high develop as also ethical intelligence, conjugating this intelligences we can assure that emotional intelligence becomes more effective, even so some times it's necessary lead by example, emotional intelligence don't make sure we're able to do that, in that cases it's important to associate also analytical, strategical and practical intelligence to be a great leader.

my mottos will always be:
1 - train values before training emotional intelligence
2 - emotional intelligence is all the more effective the more cognitive intelligence we have.
3 - Empathy , easy relationships do not solve all kind of problems,to create a vision or analyzing complex problems, we always need practical, analytical and strategical intelligence.

Alexandre

Luis,

I do NOT believe that emotional intelligence equates to leadership. I recognize from comments you have made on some of my posts that you believe I hold the position that the two are synonymous, but I do not. My use of metaphors and correlations that do not translate well are likely the reason for this misunderstanding.

Now, regarding this question, what are your thoughts:

- To what degree can you be an effective team leader without holding and practicing the qualities of emotional intelligence at a foundational level?

Dear Joy
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion

Interesting what you wrote:
"I believe the answer to this question is quite obvious and doesn't need spelling out"

Interestingly I have read many opinions where people confuse leadership with emotional intelligence

Hi Luis, an interesting insight from Daniel Goleman in Working With Emotional Intelligence (New York, NY. Bantum Books) was that EI accounted for 67% of the abilities deemed necessary for superior performance in leaders.

This may explain to a certain extent why people confuse EI with Leadership, although the two are quite distinct.

Leadership is very much situational. In some situations, emotional intelligence - or, as I like to call it, emotional fitness - is primordial. In other situations, not so much. (For example, handling a bomb threat is not the time to coddle people.)