Emotionally Intelligent Leaders: Do They (Not) Exist?.

A few days ago, in collaboration with Selekcija.hr, we hosted a webinar titled "Emotional Leaders: Do They (Not) Exist?" The webinar's somewhat clickbait-y title garnered a good response, prompting us to write a few lines about emotional intelligence for those who couldn't, didn't, or wouldn't watch the webinar.

For this reason, we made an effort to write an article that fits into the ideal seven minutes of internet reading, or 1,600 words.

What prompted us to think about emotional intelligence?

We relied on Herzberg's 1959 study, which aimed to answer the question of which business factors contribute to extreme employee satisfaction and which factors lead to a lack of employee satisfaction.

Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory emerged as a conclusion of this research. The theory states that there are two types of factors:

• Hygiene and
• Motivational.

Hygiene factors contribute to a certain level of job satisfaction, but if they are not met, a high level of job dissatisfaction occurs. Today, hygiene factors include salary, benefits such as a company phone, laptop, even a car, paid supplementary insurance, and even fruit and free coffee or lunch at work.

Motivational factors, if present, can cause a great deal of satisfaction. These factors today can be recognized as challenging work, recognition and appreciation, a stimulating and pleasant environment, and the influence of good leaders and mentors…

Considering that hygiene factors are met in most high-tech companies today, we focused on the motivational ones, which led us to consider whether there is enough emotional intelligence in high-tech environments.

We also considered how to retain employees in the desirable "upper right quadrant" regarding their psychological safety.

In the learning zone, employees and team members actively collaborate, learn, and achieve high performance, taking on new and complex tasks and projects.

But let's start from the beginning.

What is our current (realistic) situation?

• Employee stress has reached an all-time high, according to Gallup's 2022 annual report on the global workplace.
• "Bad interpersonal relationships are the main reason why we quit," Research in Croatia, MojPosao.hr, February 2022.
• "Every second person considers quitting more now than two years ago (51%), a fifth (22%) do so just as much as before, while 27% of respondents now 'juggle' with that thought less often," MP 2022.
• Employees are 4 times more likely to quit if their leaders have low EQ than if their leaders have high EQ, according to a 2015 Gallup study.
• Although 95% of people believe they are self-aware, in reality only 10% to 15% truly are, according to a five-year research project by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, Harvard Business Review, 2018.

Also, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world suddenly changed. For leaders, the pandemic was an extremely challenging and difficult period for working and managing their people.

The speed with which we moved to remote work, different work habits (pajamas and working at midnight…), different behavioral patterns (online communication lacking nonverbal cues), and a limited environment (nuclear family?) was not matched by our human evolution. Although some were pleasantly surprised by the new form of work, many of us became estranged from each other and stopped "feeling." Such behavior is, from an evolutionary perspective, still foreign and unnatural to all of us.

For this reason, certain connections and relationships within teams weaken and even break down, leading to mutual estrangement.

Where to start, or how to (re)gain a cohesive and long-term sustainable team?

For close cooperation with their employees and to achieve a cohesive team, line managers – leaders – must possess certain skills:

• strong leadership abilities,
• developed empathy,
• good communication skills,
• organizational skills,
• trust,
• proactive thinking,
• decisiveness…

To meet most of these (current) prerequisites, especially if we look at it from the perspective of Generation Z, today's leaders must be more emotionally intelligent than ever.

Also, along with emotional intelligence, and before we continue, we would like to mention the so-called circles of security. We "drag" them from the Paleolithic era. During that period, our ancestors were exposed to danger daily. They were surrounded by various weather hazards, animals… In the rift between all these dangers, they created their circles of security and felt safe and among their own.

And that is why in life, the main relationship that is very important in all aspects is the relationship of trust. We trust our partners, friends, and various manufacturers of goods and services. We must also have a relationship of trust with our team members. However, we cannot simply come to them and say: "Trust me!" or "Cooperate!"

It doesn't work that way precisely because feelings and emotions are involved in every relationship. When feelings are involved, orders don't work.

Only when the condition of security is met, the natural reaction that arises is trust and the desire for cooperation.

What do leaders do differently, and why do we follow them?

Good leaders create circles of security for everyone and enable others to dedicate themselves to what they do best. Good leaders are the first to recognize the achievements of others, thus creating a stimulating and productive environment. Good leaders give instead of taking. They lift our spirits instead of bringing them down. When we are around such people, we feel comfortable, secure, and trusting. That's why we follow them. Good leaders are emotionally intelligent.

The Beginnings of Emotional Intelligence

In the early 1990s, psychologists John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey introduced the concept of emotional intelligence. Salovey and Mayer defined emotional intelligence as a "subset" of social intelligence that includes the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.

The term emotional intelligence was popularized in 1995 by psychologist and journalist Dr. Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence.

Since then, emotional intelligence has become widely accepted as a key indicator of success in life.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to accurately perceive, understand, and respond to the emotions of others.

Emotional intelligence is also the ability to be aware of and understand one's own emotions and the emotions of others. It's about being able to regulate your emotions, respond effectively to the emotions of others, and build positive relationships.

It includes four main skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

In the workplace, the ability to understand and monitor your own emotions, as well as the emotions of those around you, is crucial for maintaining a positive and productive environment. This ability is known as emotional intelligence, and it can be as important as IQ in predicting success in various fields.

In a fast-paced and demanding business environment, it is more important than ever to have strong emotional intelligence. Given the changes brought about by the digitalization of business, and ultimately the "legacy" left by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is very important to be able to regulate your emotions, respond effectively to the emotions of others, and build positive relationships.

There are many benefits of strong emotional intelligence in the workplace. Firstly, we are more likely to create and maintain a cohesive team, stimulate and retain motivational factors, and thereby achieve both group and individual business goals, and ultimately reduce the (existing) fluctuation of our employees.

Does a Structured Life Kill Emotional Intelligence?

Working as consultants in human resource management, we were troubled by the correlation between technical professions and emotional intelligence.

A recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology showed that people in technical professions are less emotionally intelligent. The study, conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Vienna, found that people working in technical professions scored lower on measures of emotional intelligence than those working in non-technical professions.

The study investigated the relationship between emotional intelligence and occupation type by observing a sample of over 4,000 workers from a range of different industries.

Also, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto examined data from more than 1,000 participants. They found that people in technical professions scored lower on measures of empathy and emotion recognition.

Why is this so?

There are several possible explanations for the causes.

Firstly, technical professions often require a high level of cognitive ability and abstraction, which can interfere with the ability to read emotions.

Secondly, work environments in technical professions are often highly competitive and individualistic, which can lead to reduced empathy and social skills.

Innate or Learned?

Following these research findings, we were interested in whether people can be taught emotional intelligence.

Although it is a common belief that emotional intelligence is innate, recent research published in the journal PLOS ONE shows that emotional intelligence can be developed through training.

Today, we recognize three main models of emotional intelligence:

• the mixed model,
• the ability model, and
• the trait model.

The mixed model, closest to us, conceptualizes emotional intelligence as a combination of emotional skills and personality dimensions (assertiveness and optimism).

Emotional Social Intelligence (ESI) is a multifactorial set of competencies and skills that determine how people express and understand themselves.

ESI consists of:

• Self-esteem
• Interpersonal relationships
• Impulse control
• Problem solving
• Emotional self-awareness
• Flexibility
• Reality testing
• Stress tolerance
• Assertiveness and empathy.

The ability model focuses on information processing, while the trait model views emotional intelligence as emotion-related information.

It is important to note that these models are not mutually exclusive, while Hodzic et al. confirm that emotional intelligence can be accurately measured using psychometric tests.

(Hodzic, S., Scharfen, J., Ripoll, P., Holling, H. and Zenasni, F. (2018). How efficient are emotional intelligence trainings: a meta-analysis. Emotion Review)

The research described in PLOS ONE was conducted in an international company on a sample of 54 executives. The sample was drawn from the entire population of executives within the company using a stratified random sampling procedure, taking into account the gender of the population to ensure equal representation of both sexes.

The average age of participants was 37.61 years (standard deviation = 8.55), and the percentage of female executives was 50%. For evaluation purposes, these employees were randomly divided into two groups: an experimental group (n = 26; mean age = 35.57 (7.54); 50% women) and a control group (n = 28; mean age = 39.50 (9.11); 50% women).

The results are shown in the graph below.

These findings serve as empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the training program implemented in this study in improving key dimensions of emotional intelligence that promote emotional skills that are both necessary and desirable in the workplace.

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Gardner and Stough further investigated the relationship between leadership and EI among senior managers and found that a leader's management of positive and negative emotions had a beneficial effect on motivation, optimism, innovation, and problem-solving in the workplace.

Therefore, the emotional intelligence of leaders is expected to be positively correlated with employee motivation and achievement.

Additionally, more emotionally intelligent people will more easily make:

• the selection of organizational goals,
• the planning and organization of work activities,
• the maintenance of collaborative interpersonal relationships, and
• the obtaining of the support needed to achieve those organizational goals.

And so, if our structured life, education, work environment, or something else has diminished our emotional intelligence, let's learn it.

Because… emotionally intelligent leaders strive to create a positive work environment that enhances employee satisfaction. And there, among other things, lies our answer to reducing turnover.

Of course, along with meeting the hygiene conditions according to Herzberg's two-factor theory (which we constantly emphasize).