Emotional intelligence is essential to help your employees' wellbeing

Martin says: "There is a direct link between the profitability of an organisation and the emotional intelligence of its managers. This was the finding of a new study conducted by Dr Bilal Zaghmout, of York St John University, who interviewed managers across the UK to understand the relationship between management style and organisational performance. He found that a 10% increase in a manager’s emotional intelligence score resulted in a 7% increase in overall business performance.

I doubt you’ll be surprised by this. I mean, logically, it makes sense right? Humans are complex and unique. We each have our own lives, our own emotions, our own wants, needs, ambitions, and the more someone can understand our emotions (as well as their own) the more able they’ll be to lead and inspire. Daniel Goleman, one of the world’s leading psychologists and author of Emotional Intelligence says that without emotional intelligence “a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”

Goleman’s book came out in 1995 so, theoretically, what we’re discussing here is nothing new. Similarly, we have studies dating 15 years or more demonstrating that EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is more powerful than IQ; that the success of outstanding leaders is largely attributable to their emotional intelligence and that unlike IQ, EQ doesn’t peak in the same way, it continues to evolve throughout our lives. So, why the continued interest in an area we already know so much about? Because we’re having to put it into practice

There has been what Forbes magazine calls “a paradigm shift in leadership”. The task- orientated, autocratic style of old just doesn’t hold up in a world where employees demand work life harmony. For many of us, work and life are integrated, balanced, flexible even, and this is only possible where leaders can empathetically tune into the needs of their people. But, here’s the kicker, while we know the importance of EQ for our businesses, for our people, and for the bottom line, most managers are still promoted on the basis of their technical skill. You’ll have seen it before, the best ‘X’ in the company is promoted and becomes the worst ‘Y’. While the promotee is undeniably talented and was, previously, an excellent colleague, they’re suddenly prone to outburst, quick to cast blame, and create an air of tension wherever they go.

And while some of us will naturally be more emotionally intelligent than others, there’s no doubt that EQ can be developed. It can mature and be nurtured, but to improve EQ we must be willing to invest in our managers. Growing bodies of research tie emotional intelligence to decision making, engagement, resilience, performance and more, but we can’t expect our leaders to flourish in these areas without first showing them how. We’re often quick to chastise our managers when things haven’t quite gone to plan, but in doing so we’re only looking at the headlines, the tip of the iceberg, rather than examining what’s happening underneath the waves.

How can we improve emotional intelligence? That’s a story for another day. But perhaps the most satisfying piece of the puzzle is that as each characteristic of EQ is developed (these being, according to Goleman, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill) they have a knock-on effect on the others. They work in synergy and therefore provide exponential returns.