It’s a pretty common refrain around PowerToFly that the world has plenty of bosses, but not enough leaders! What’s the difference? It’s simple: leadership skills and emotional intelligence.
Attrition can be due to a lot of factors — better pay elsewhere, working style incompatibility, etc. But there’s one reason in particular that takes a big piece of the cake, and we don’t discuss it nearly often.
7 out of 10 employees would call it quits because of bad leadership. If your workplace is suffering from high attrition rates, a lack of leadership skills and emotional intelligence could be one of the reasons. Notably, it might not always seem like a leadership crisis because surface numbers, trends, and the business trajectory look good. After all, without good leadership, how would an organization remain in the positive?
How do leadership skills and emotional intelligence intersect?
So then what’s the key to good leadership? Good emotional skills. That’s right! Leadership skills and emotional intelligence go hand in hand. The general stereotype is that a leader needs to be firm, stoic, and strict to get the job done. But leaders who are all work and no heart might succeed at crushing the goals but wouldn’t succeed at creating a loyal team. Treating employees as people first, understanding their professional needs, and also connecting with them as people.
Here’s how adding emotional intelligence to the mix can strengthen your leadership skills:
Empathy
There is a style of leadership that runs on orders, instructions, and commands, but we’ve got one a little better that also runs on respect, understanding, and, more importantly, kindness. Forbes reports empathy is the most important leadership skill of them all, and yet 52% of employees believe their leaders aren’t doing a good job at being empathetic.
Empathy in the workplace can look like many small efforts. For starters, if an employee hasn’t been doing well at work, it can absolutely look like a PIP made with kindness. A real-world example: 2024 brought a lot of uncertainty with elections and geopolitical tensions all around. Empathy is understanding how that can impact your employees on a personal level, and providing them with the appropriate support they need.
Being empathetic doesn’t take going out of your way or losing your assertiveness. Empathy only takes compassion, which also applies to leadership skills.
Feedback
What puts emotional intelligence to the test? Well, lots of things, but how you go about delivering criticism is one of the toughest. Feedback fails if it doesn’t motivate the team, and instead pushes them into self-doubt or disengagement. If you’re a leader wondering how to improve productivity and boost morale across your team, following a “Yes, and” model could help. This is a technique we can borrow from improvisational comedy of all places, but really what you’re doing is providing an avenue for continued discourse.
For instance, instead of saying, “No, the design doesn’t work,” help your designer understand why and how to make it better, aka, “Yes, good effort at that. I really like the choice of colors, and if you could just experiment with a bolder typeface or perhaps increase the size of the text, it would be great.”
Not only does it help your designer understand what is needed, but it also doesn’t sound like a flat-out rejection – because it isn’t!
Feedback is a two-way street. A good leader with high emotional intelligence accepts criticism just as graciously as they provide it. They understand that productive criticism is important, and they encourage it. An open-door policy encourages all your team members to have an honest conversation on what’s working and what’s not. It is a way to lead with more transparency and acceptance. Remember, good leaders are always active listeners.
Trust your inner voice
Intuition is not just for personal matters, it’s a great skill all around!
Think about it – how many times did you know in your gut that a deal was not going to go through and then it didn’t? Perhaps, during an interview, you had a bad feeling about a candidate; you went ahead and hired them, only to regret not listening to your inner knowing. Trust it. Bring your intuition to work.
Your intuition works in the opposite too, maybe you had a great feeling about a candidate who didn’t check all the technical boxes but ended up being an incredible employee! Also, intuition isn’t at odds with intellect. Often, your emotional intelligence and professional intelligence can work together in perfect sync and give you answers much before the time comes.
Want to know how? Tune into this chat on key tips to foster emotional intelligence for leadership skills.
Teamwork
How your team views you is a good reflection of how you are doing as a leader. Do they feel comfortable confiding in you when they are struggling at work? Do they perform out of fear or out of a sense of duty? The best is, of course, if they perform well because of positive reinforcement and healthy dynamics. To mobilize and motivate your employees, you’ll need soft skills for managers.
These soft skills don’t come from professional talents, or even necessarily from any specific expertise. Nope, they’re rooted in emotional intelligence.
To make a team work, you have to work at it with each team member, and that’s not an easy job! Every employee is truly unique with their own talents, thoughts, and, of course, communication styles. (It’s a thing – read all about communication styles right here.)
How do you manage YOURSELF?
Last, but the most important! A manager is only as good as their management; of their team, and of themselves. Emotional intelligence brings self-awareness and self-regulation.
Great leadership can come from people who are talented, experienced, or even just lucky, but it can leave just as fast if you’re unprepared to step up to the plate. To lead well, we must first lead by example, so it should go without saying that if we want our employees to be disciplined and punctual, guess who’s the best person to show them how it’s done! If the manager themselves comes to work late on a daily basis, that message isn’t going to stick.
If you would like your employees to upskill and expand their learning base, a great way to encourage them is to provide them with the necessary resources to do so. However, to really enforce it, you should probably invest in some upskilling of your own!
PowerUp is a community of learners, mentors, and the ambitious leaders of today and tomorrow, aka the right place for you! Our new course on emotional intelligence for leaders is here to help you lead with more connection, kindness, and confidence. From self-management to relationship management with all stakeholders, this is your ultimate toolkit.
