Emotional Intelligence, the best indicator for managerial/leadership success
Posted on January 22, 2013 by Gil Davidson, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Find it hard to predict good leadership? You may be looking in the wrong place. EI proves a better indicator than technical competence.
Bob shook his head as he contemplated the disruption of another manager hired because he looked good on paper and yet has turned out to be such a bad fit. Sure he knows his subject, but since he came on board the staff seem to have withdrawn all initiative and the level of productivity has dropped instead of going up. In fact, Bob is spending more time in the department now, putting out fires, than he did when he oversaw the department. He just can’t figure it out, this manager looked so good on paper.
It has been said that we hire for technical competence and fire for behavioural incompetence. If that is so, maybe it’s time for a perspective shift. A shift from seeing technical skill and knowledge as the key indicators of success to seeing them as a starting point, with behavioural skills being a more reliable indicator of success in management positions. Behavioural competence is often referred to as an emotional intelligence (EI). More and more studies are showing the importance of a high EI (Emotional Quotient/Intelligence) in successful managers and leaders.
EI is the level of self awareness a person has around how they interact with their environment. The manager who is aware that she can be intimidating and adjusts her behaviour (so as not to threaten her staff in order to encourage their initiative) has a higher EI than an assertive manager who, seeing her staff withdrawing, asserts herself more in an effort to ‘force’ co-operation out of them.
The Harvard School of Business, in recognising the importance of EI, asserts, “Our candidate for No. 1 managerial aptitude of the next decade is self-awareness.”
Technical skills are more relevant for a technical position than a leadership one. Likewise behavioural skills (while always advantageous) are more critical for leaders. When you hire or promote based on technical competence with no assessment of EI or behavioural competence you are inadvertently inviting disaster.
Before you reward that brilliant technician with a managerial promotion, make sure you assess his EI and invest in developing it where it is lacking. This can be done through courses or through coaching. Coaching develops EI by raising the level of self-awareness around his values, his impact on people/situations and how he allows people/situations to impact him. If you choose to send him on a managerial course, assess it’s behavioural (EI) content, make sure it isn’t just teaching him theory, but is providing him with experiential learning.
If, after investing in developing his EI he doesn’t manage to sufficiently grow his level of self-awareness, reward him with other forms of recognition and financial benefit equal to the manager. He is very valuable to you, don’t punish him by moving him from an area of competence to incompetence. Just because someone is a phenomenal accountant doesn’t mean he would make a great manager of the accounting department. Avoid frustrating your star performers, yourself and all around them before you end up losing them on bad terms and to the competition. Try promoting or hiring from a new perspective, one that places the correct emphasis on behavioural vs technical competence.
