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Develop your emotional intelligence.
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE want to be better managers and leaders, but they are puzzled as to how to reach that elusive goal. With good intentions, they attend training programs, get MBAs, and hire consultants and coaches. And yet the degree of change is often small. Then they either throw more resources into training or believe that great managers and leaders are born, not made. Sadly, the return on the massive investment in management and leadership development is small.
A common mistake is to think that acquiring more knowledge will make you a better manager or leader. To be effective, managers and leaders need to use their knowledge to make things happen. These can be called competencies-characteristics that lead to effective and outstanding performance. Certain competencies predict outstanding manager or leader performance. They include: 1) cognitive or intellectual ability, such as systems thinking; 2) self-management or intrapersonal abilities, such as adaptability; and 3) relationship management or interpersonal abilities, such as networking. The sec ond and third competencies make up emotional intelligence.
Beyond knowledge and competencies, outstanding performance requires the desire to develop and use your talents. This desire seems to be driven by a person's values, beliefs, sense of calling or mission, motives, and traits. These three domains of capability (knowledge, competencies, and motivational drivers) help us to understand "what a person needs to do" (knowledge), "how a person needs to do it" (competencies), and "why a person will do it" (values, motives, and dispositions).
If we assume that competencies are characteristics with which you are born, we focus more on selection and placement rather than development. But these competencies-and in particular the ones called emotional intelligence-can be developed.
We have discovered a self-directed learning process that yields sustained behavioral change, providing hope that people can develop the competencies that matter most to outstanding performance-ones we call emotional intelligence. EI competencies include social awareness, self-awareness, self-management, relationship management, empathy, and teamwork.
Most sustainable behavioral change is intentional. Self-directed change is an intentional change in an aspect of who you are (the Real) or who you want to be (the Ideal), or both. Self-directed learning is self-directed change in which you are aware of the change and understand the process of change.