Emotional Intelligence for Managers
A Hot List of Information & Resources On Emotional Intelligence
From a managerial perspective, emotional intelligence is the ability to make intelligent use of emotions in ways that enhance both your personal and interpersonal effectiveness. We are all emotionally driven creatures. Savvy executives understand how emotions move people to act and they put this understanding to intelligent use. Yet, there is also a great deal of unsubstantiated pop-psychology around about emotional intelligence and managers need to be careful that the information they access is trustworthy and grounded in evidence.
This 'lens' on emotional intelligence is designed to help you cut through the sea of drivel and access quality information that will help you to lead in more emotionally intelligent ways.
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Successfully Managing Emotions
- Successfully Managing Emotions Series
- This single link will take you to the series homepage.
Understanding Emotions
Here are 10 quick facts to get you started:
- Emotions describe how we feel in response to something that has happened. These reactions are both logical and predictable.
- Primary emotions, upon which all other emotions are based, include feeling happy, accepted, interested, surprised, worried, angry, disgusted and sad.
- Each primary emotion has a universal cause, which means that we can predict that of X happens a person will feel Y.
- Emotions drive us to act in certain ways, with different emotions prompting different behaviours.
- Emotions contain valuable information about the situation at hand, if we know that someone we feels Y, we also know a great deal about what has happened to them even before we know the details.
- Knowing how someone else feels gives us valuable insight into how to best interact with them.
- Expressing emotions in respectful and contextually appropriate ways greatly increases the impact of your communication with others.
- We show our emotional reaction to events around us through fleeting, involuntary expressions that cross our face when something good or bad happens to us.
- Hiding and suppressing feelings hinders communication and has a host of negative consequences.
- Emotions, harnessed well, enhance rather than impede rational thinking and decision-making.
Best 5 Quotes About Emotionally Intelligent Leadership
4 Steps To More Accurate Emotional Awareness
- Ask yourself which of the primary emotions you are feeling right now. Try to choose just 1 or 2. Remember the primary emotions are happiness, sadness, worry, surpise, anger, belonging, interest and disgust.
- Change each of your 1-2 labels from step 1 to reflect the intensity of the emotion you are feeling. For example, someone who is very interested would be excited while someone who was just a little angry would be annoyed.
- If you chose just one emotion in step 1, stop now - you do not need to do step 3. However, if you chose two emotions in step 1, think about how they blend together. For example, anger + disgust = contempt and happiness + interest = hope. Try to come up with a single label that blends your two primary emotions together.
- Think about how your feelings are impacting on you others. What are the emotions prompting you to do? (eg to stand-up for yourself, to act now in order to stop something bad from happening, to seek help etc). Should you act on these feelings, and if so how could you do so in an intelligent way?
Top 5 EI Assessments
Assessing Your Emotional Intelligence
Want To Know More About Emotions
Read these free online resources
Want A Really Deep Understanding
Buy these reputable texts
From Understanding To Emotionally Intelligent Actions
Online Resources To Buy
- The Best of Harvard Business Review On Emotional Intelligence
- Four of the best articles available from Daniel Goleman and his colleagues in one package. A
- Primal Leadership
- An 8 page summary of Goleman's book Primal Leadership.
- Micro -Expressions Training Tool
- An online training tool from the world's leading authority on facial expression that will teach you how to accurately read how others are feeling from the involuntary micro-expressions on their face.
- Making the Connection: Leadership Skills & Emotional Intelligence
- A great article on emotionally intelligent leadership from the Center for Creative Leadership
- Knowing Our Emotions, Improving Our World
- Podcast of a dialogue between two of the world's leading authorities on emotions, Daniel Goleman & Paul Ekman
- Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Intelligence
- A dialogue between Richard Davidson the director of Affective Neuroscience at Harvard University and Daniel Goleman on the neurological foundations of emotional intelligence.
- Leading Teams With Emotional Intelligence
- Simulation From Harvard Business School
The Best Books On Emotional Intelligence & Leadership
Great Websites About Emotional Intelligence
- EI Skills Group
- A site devoted to the orginal, ability model of emotional intelligence.
- Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence
- The mission of the EI Consortium is to advance research and practice of emotional and social intelligence in organizations through the generation and exchange of knowledge.
- ReuvenBarOn.org
- A site that explains Reuven Bar-On's well known model of emotional intelligence.
Readers Choice - The Top 5 EI Training Courses Around - You Vote
What Is The Best Emotional Intelligence Development You Have Come Across
Is emotional intelligence real?
Emotional intelligence is still a relatively new concept. Psychologists continue to debatet whether it is real, or whether it just a combination of traits (eg IQ, extraversion, sensitivity). .Serious scholars argue over the nature of emotional intelligence. Is it a true intelligence or is it a set of learnable skills? And, many managers continue to wonder whether it just another buzzword and passing fad.
Is emotional intelligence real?
Yes its real and clearly linked to effective leadership
nisha says:
yes
Jorge Henón says:
I aply to Software Organizations
cgolis says:
However a major problem with most models of EQ is that they focus on the transient emotions. I disagree. I believe that what is essential in lifting your Emotional Intelligence is an understanding of temperament, which is that part of the personality that is genetically based and is what determines your habitual emotional response.
Caruso and Salovey in their book on EQ "The Emotionally Intelligent Manager" devote two pages to some people having typical ways of looking at the world and calling these dispositional traits. I would argue the opposite and say all of us have core dispositional traits and that it the mixture of these traits with some being dominant and others weak that make us all unique. The model that I have found best at explaining temperament is the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale. This model says we are all slightly insane and as I get older I am more and more relaxed about this hypothesis. The model also says we have seven core emotional drives six based on the most common forms of insanity and a seventh that tries to bring logic and order into our personality.
The Humm was the first statistically valid personality test developed and the following article from the 27 July, 1942 issue of Time, ?Pegs that Fit?, provides a practical introduction to the model.
I have amplified these views in my blog and in my book.
Steve Swavely, Ph.D. says:
I believe it's real, although we are still learning how to define it and measure it - The more we learn about how our brain and mind function the more outdated concepts like IQ and EQ become. However, at the same time, without some mechanism to measure our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functions, we give up being a scientist. As primitive and artificial as they may be, attempts to create and measure concepts such as IQ and EQ are critical to further evolution of the field and to the development of more robust ways to make sense of who we are and how we can be more effective at doing those things which are important to us. Emotional intelligence is a good example of how a concept can be formed based on known neuroscience at the time, and then evolve into the concept of Social Intelligence as the science upon which it is based also evolves.
TamaraKelly says:
I think emotional intelligence is best described as a metaphor. Whether it meets the strict psychological guidelines for being an 'intelligence' it provides a useful way of undertsanding many of the soft skills of leadership.
Cheers
Tamara
I think it is a dubious fad because ...
Michael Mascolo says:
Is emotional intelligence real? May I change the question just a bit? I would prefer to frame the question like this: Is the concept of emotional intelligence a useful one? For me, it is of limited usefulness. On constructive use of the concept is to highlight the importance of the "emotional" in addition to the "intellectual". It says: What we call intellectual acumen is not the only important thing -- socio-emotional skills are very important!
But there are downsides of this concept. First, as indicated by Steve and Wayne, emotion and cognition are not separable, either in action or at the level of neurophysiology. Emotion is essential for all actions -- intentional or otherwise. The idea that logic should rule emotions is a flawed one because it presupposes that the capacity for logic or thinking independent of emotions. To be sure, Mr. Spock, of Star Trek fame, would surely die without the participation of his emotions. Emotions select, organize and amplify thought and action!
And second, as suggested by Wayne, human capacities are not monolithic entities. There is no single "intelligence". And there certainly is no single "emotional intelligence". Our emotional lives are complex and variegated. Concepts like IQ and EQ take a necessarily heterogeneous set of processes and capacities and lump them all together into a single entity. This entity does not exist. At best, measures such as IQ provide general descriptions of broad configurations of human capacities. While IQ may be useful as but one general predictor of human some classes of human achievement, our behavior is neither fixed nor static. We are dynamic beings whose concrete actions are complex, emergent and multi-faceted.
Reader Feedback
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Interesting lens Shaun, take a look at my website about emotional intelligence:
http://www.emotionalintelligence.tv/ -
Great lens Shaun. I have lensrolled you on two of my lenses and also highlighted the lens on my Career and Work Oracle group - please do add yourself to that as a member (together with any other relevent lenses for submission):
(http://www.squidoo.com/groups/career-site)
Onwards!
Sherridan -
Great lens, but you knew that :) Just wanted to remind you that this is featured on the Consciousness, Awareness, Psychology & Neurology Headquarters
http://www.squidoo.com/groups/consciousness
It's now transformed into a lensography and I would love it if you could show your appreciation by featuring it here, or lensrolling it or something. -
Very interesting lens! You share a lot of helpful information here. Please feel free to stop by my lens and say hi when you get the chance. -
Jorge Henón mail: jhenon@adinet.com.uy Jun 23, 2009 @ 8:13 am | deleteI have email from Richard Boyatzis y Daniel Goleman, but I want information from you about Primar Leader Leadership to aply in organizations of diferent class including Sofwtare Organization (like Ibm, and more small) e including Health Organizations.
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