Training Industry Quarterly - Summer 2012 - (Page 33)
Increasing Leadership Performance with Emotional Intelligence Click the link above to hear a podcast recording of this TIQ article you don’t truly experience the barriers to performance in any Job until you’re in it b y d r . t r a v i s b r a d b e r r y A . common refrain heard from corporate executives, “You don’t know what it’s like to run this company,” yields very little sympathy, even though it happens to be true. It’s quite difficult to understand the myriad ways in which organizations handicap their leaders performance unless you are one. However, the same is true of any position — you don’t truly experience the barriers to performance in any job until you’re in it. When it comes to leadership positions, there is no greater barrier to performance than emotional intelligence. The further you climb up the corporate ladder, and the more people you are responsible for, the more your emotional intelligence skills come into play. During the last decade, my research team and I have tested the emotional intelligence of more than a million people, including 100,000 senior executives. We’ve found emotional intelligence is so critical to success in leadership positions that it’s responsible for 58 percent of a leader’s job per- formance. Likewise, more than 90 percent of top performers in leadership positions have a high degree of emotional intelligence. Considering the mountains written about emotional intelligence, you’d think corporate executives would be pretty smart about it. They’re not. Only the top performers are high in emotional intelligence. Most leaders are on the other end of the scale. Emotional intelligence scores climb with titles from the bottom of the corporate ladder upward toward middle management. Middle managers, on average, have the highest emotional intelligence scores in the workforce. For titles of director and above, scores descend faster than a snowboarder on a black diamond, all the way down to CEOs who have the lowest emotional intelligence scores in the workplace (see Figure 1, next page). A leader’s primary function is to get work done through people. Too many leaders are promoted because of what they know, how long they have worked, or for numbers they achieved in a bygone 33 Training Industry Quarterly, Summer 2012 / A Training Industry, Inc. ezine / www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ
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