What kind of leader do you want to be?
The fascinating connection between leadership and emotional intelligence
Imagine a golf player at the golf course with their golf bag filled with different golf clubs. Over the course of a game, the player has to pick and choose clubs based on the demands of the shot. Sometimes they have to ponder their selection, but most of the time it is automatic. The golf player senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work¹.
But, why am I telling you about golf today? Well, this is a very powerful metaphor provided by Daniel Goleman in his famous Harvard Business Review paper on leadership style and emotional intelligence.
Today I am going to tell to you about some research on leadership style and how this has massively helped me in the last few years while transitioning into a leadership role.
It was only less than 3 years ago when I had the opportunity to move from an individual contributor role to a management role. As most of us, who choose and have the opportunity to make that transition, I was thrown in at the deep end. And, as someone who’s thrown in at the deep end, I used the tools I had in my toolbox, I acted instinctively, and I ended up shaping my leadership style following my own nature and values.
That was good enough to get started in my new career, but was definitely not good enough to make progress. In particular, by nature I am a people person. I enjoy working with people. I like listening to them and understanding what drives them and what worries them; what they want to achieve and what they think their strengths and weaknesses are. And I like to show my vulnerabilities, too. These are fantastic tools to create strong relationships based on mutual trust.
However, I’m also someone who worries about disappointing people, being disliked and left out. As a first-time manager, I was worried I would become a people-pleaser and would not manage to challenge people and help them to make progress in their careers, nor create a vision, inspire and set a direction.
That’s why I decided to spend some time researching and studying leadership style. There are different theories out there.
Probably the most famous one is the so-called Situational Leadership Theory, developed by the author Ken Blanchard and the behavioural scientist Paul Hersey between the 70s and the 80s. The main concept is that there’s no single best leadership style but leaders have to adapt to situations and people they work with. In particular, they describe 4 leadership styles, directing, coaching, supporting and delegating. Leaders have to use them depending on the development level of the person they’re working with. The 4 development levels are defined as a combination of competence and commitment.
The theory I actually prefer is the one I referred to at the beginning of my post. Daniel Goleman is an author and science journalist and is famous for his book on emotional intelligence² that in 1995 made this concept very popular. In the paper I mentioned before, Goleman describes 6 leadership styles. Like great golf players with their clubs, great leaders have these different styles at their disposal in their “leadership style” bags.
These are the 6 leadership styles he describes:
- Coercive is about demanding immediate compliance
- Authoritative is about mobilising people toward a vision
- Affiliative is about creating emotional bonds and harmony
- Democratic is about building consensus through participation
- Pacesetting is about expecting excellence and self-direction
- Coaching is about developing people for the future.
According to Goleman, each one of them is relying on specific emotional intelligence components. Emotional intelligence consists of 4 fundamental capabilities: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills. Each capability, in turn, is composed of specific sets of competencies, for example self-confidence, initiative, empathy or communication. The idea is that, if you want to develop one of your leadership styles, you’ll have to work on a subset of these competencies.
As you can imagine from my previous statements about myself, when I came across this research, I felt I was pretty good when it came to being affiliative or democratic, but I had no idea how to be authoritative or pacesetting and I definitely wanted to improve my coaching style, too.
How can we understand and read other people to be able to help, influence and guide them if we don’t understand ourselves?
If you think that today I’m going to tell you the perfect recipe to learn about all these styles, you’ll be disappointed, but I can surely share some advice from my personal experience.
First of all, understanding that there are multiple leadership styles and no one is the best is really important. Secondly, becoming more aware of our own emotional ecosystem is key to be great leaders. How can we understand and read other people to be able to help, influence and guide them if we don’t understand ourselves? In other words, like the Ancient Greek aphorism goes, know thyself.
I personally started with a self-assessment against the emotional intelligence capabilities. Then, I decided which leadership styles I wanted to improve on and which emotional intelligence capabilities I needed to focus on as a consequence. In the real world, I’ve been trying to be mindful of my own emotions, read the situation and the people around me and practice the different styles whenever I thought it was needed. It doesn’t come natural at the beginning, it takes time and practice, but if you’re patient you can make it a habit.
Before I finish, I want to leave you with some food for thought. You may or may not think about yourself as a leader. The reality is everyone of you is a leader, be it in your private or professional lives. And as leaders we all have our style. Now that you know more about the connection with emotional intelligence and that there are different styles for different situations, think about it: what kind of leader do you want to be?
[1] Leadership That Gets Results, Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman
[2] Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman
