Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

Improving First-Level Supervision of Federal Employees, found appreciable differences
between supervisor’s perceptions of their own EI-related behaviors and that of their direct
reports. Employees wanted to be far more engaged than the extent to which they
perceive supervisors engage them. Possible remedies were tendered by McPhie (2009) in
the MSPB study, Managing for Engagement – Communication, Connection, and
Courage, to include promoting a positive work environment and appropriately
recognizing work.
Research honing in on developing leaders with interpersonal competence
appeared, albeit superficially. To wit, Turner (2007) stated that, for Federal government
executives, “the most valuable approaches to leadership skills development are
experiential and relational” (p. 53). At the same time, Turner (2007) emphasized that
knowledge and expertise building, skill alignment with culture, and the ability to use
knowledge to confront challenges were key leader development program success factors:
relation building factors were largely absent from this success recipe. A different study
(Koonce, 2010) called for refurbishing Federal government senior leadership
development programs to include fashioning new skills. Leaders need to “get better
acquainted with their own personal style, strengths, and weaknesses” (Koonce, 2010, p.
45). Coaching is an individual agency phenomenon, to help promote a leader’s own
transformation and continual learning. In this manner, Koonce (2010) argued that
coaching and feedback are integral to developing leaders to face myriad and ever-
increasing complexities of the Federal sector. Leader development programs inherently
need both mission and people foci, i.e., “opposing solutions [which are] needed and
interwoven” (Luscher & Lewis, 2008, p. 229).