Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence plays vital role in leadership qualities. The most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that intelligence and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter. But without emotional intelligence, in spite of having great brains and the best training in the world and an endless supply of smart ideas, a person still won’t make a great leader. The components of emotional intelligence are self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill in that sequence.

Capabilities can be classified in to three categories: purely technical skills like engineering, accounting and business planning: cognitive abilities like analytical reasoning and competencies demonstrating; emotional intelligence such as the ability to work with others and effectiveness in leading change. To be sure intellect is a driver of outstanding performance. Cognitive skills, such as long-term vision is also important. But when the ratio of excellent performance is to be calculated, emotional intelligence proves to be twice as important as the other jobs at all levels
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Emotional intelligence played an increasingly important role at the highest levels of the company, where differences in technical skills are of negligible importance. The higher the rank of a person the more emotional intelligence capabilities showed up as the reason for his or her effectiveness. When we compare star performers with average ones, nearly 90% of the difference in their profits is attributable to emotional intelligence factors rather than cognitive abilities.