Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

Potential Problem Areas

Interpersonal
Skills

Aggression

Degree to which an individual employs a communication

style that violates,

overpowers, dominates or

discredits another.

Feeling better about

dealing with anger.

Deference

Degree to which an individual

employs a communication

style that is indirect, selfinhibiting, self-denying and -

ineffectual.

Feeling better about

dealing with fear.

Self-
Management
Change
Orientation

Degree to which an individual is or is not satisfied with

current behavior, and

magnitude of change

necessary or desired to

develop leader effectiveness.

Feeling good about

making personal

changes.

Note: Adapted fromExcellence (2nd Edition (^) ) byEmotional Intelligence: Achieving Academic and Career D.B. Nelson & G.R. Low, pp. 42-163. Copyright 2011 by
Prentice Hall.^
Developing EI Skills in Leaders. As posited by Nelson and Low (2011) and
illustrated in Table 2.3 above, there are four EI skills crucial to effective leadership:
social awareness; empathy; decision making; and (personal) leadership. In order to
develop EI skills, leaders must first recognize what behaviors need honing (Yukl, 2010).
Caruso and Wolfe (2004) urged:
Given the importance of emotion and its central place in leadership effectiveness,
leadership development programs must take the development of emotional skills
more seriously. Leaders cannot be allowed to dismiss emotions as irrelevant or to
define their role in purely rational terms (p. 260).
The narrative that follows reviews scholarly literature focusing on how these EI
skills can be developed in leaders. These skills, according to Sen (2010), “must be
practiced so thoroughly that it has a lasting effect on the physiology of the person” (p.
105).