The Emotionally Intelligent Leader

Gayle took a deep breath and began. “This research has shown that, whenever an event around us occurs, such as the way someone spoke to us in a meeting, the first thing that happens is our Emotional Brain, that involves structures such as the Amygdala, tags that event as either a reward or a threat. The tag is an emotion, reward emotions are typically positive and threat emotions are typically negative.” “This emotion tag is communicated to the thinking brain that involves structures such as the pre-frontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex or thinking brain helps as determine good from bad, better from best, it helps us anticipate behaviour and determine the behavioural response to make to events. As such the first principle of this program and indeed one of the underpinnings of emotional intelligence theory is that the way you feel influences the decisions you make and the behaviour you display.” “Does that make sense?’ she asked. I nodded and Gayle continued. “The second interesting finding from research on the neuroscience of emotions is that the emotional tag or emotional signal sent from the emotional brain interacts in a way with the thinking brain that can either enhance or impair its functioning. More specifically this research has shown that positive emotional tags such as feeling satisfied, valued, useful; tend to enhance the functioning of our prefrontal cortex helping us think more openly, creatively and laterally. As such when we experience positive emotions either consciously or unconsciously we tend to be more open to new ideas, we tend to be more engaged and willing to do difficult things and develop new solutions, we tend to think more deeply about issues and see more options. Positive emotions also increase dopamine levels that are important for interest in things and learning.” “Conversely, this research has shown that negative emotional tags such as feeling concern, worry, frustration or stress tend to limit the functioning of our prefrontal cortex narrowing our thinking and limiting our interpretation of events. These negative emotions tend to diminish our cognitive resources. As a result we become biased in our views, lose our capacity to objectively evaluate situations and conceptualise our best responses to them). You may have experienced this in a verbal conflict with someone where you felt threatened and thought about all the best or ‘smartest’ things to say once you’d walked away from it,” Gayle concluded. “So putting it simply,” I said, “this program is simply about how to increase reward or positive emotions, and how to decrease or minimise threat emotions, and how to intelligently use emotions to get positive results.” “Exactly!” said Gayle. So when we look at your last 24 hours, what does your list suggest?” “That I have been experiencing more negative emotions than I have positive, but I have not been conscious of these emotions and how they may have impacted my behaviour at work. When I reflect, I do remember feeling frustrated and being short with staff members and making impulsive decisions, and I see now how this would have been seen in my behaviours.” Gayle explained, “Emotional self-awareness is the skill of perceiving and understanding one’s own emotions. It is crucial in providing the platform to effectively display productive behaviours associated with the other five competencies. Leaders who display this competency are aware of their feelings, moods and emotions at work and the causes of these feelings. Sometimes we are not conscious of the emotion we are feeling and as a result, we have a limited number of words to describe how we feel in a given situation. We need to expand our emotional vocabulary to identify what we are feeling more accurately. By bringing our subconscious emotions into our conscious brain we are present with the emotion and understand how it impacts our thoughts, decisions and behaviours.”