Leadership and Awareness Spectrum

An emotionally intelligent leader is a leader who is aware of his/her emotions and seeing how those impact others. These leaders go beyond being sensible, they are the masters of having difficult conversations, mentoring, and leading during a crisis. There are multiple dimensions of leadership, some of them are useful for building strong teams and others help with being confident, courageous, and compassionate.  On a similar spectrum, for being an emotionally intelligent leader, awareness and self-reflection are considered a few of the key traits of leadership. As per the mixed model of Goleman, he came up with 5 Elements of EI, here are five of his constructs 2:

• Self Awareness
• Self Regulation
• Social Skill 
• Empathy 
• Motivation 

Dr. Tasha Euric took a deep dive in Self Awareness and further zoomed in on internal vs external self-awareness. She came up with the below 2x2 self-awareness matrix. Where individuals fall in Pleasers, Skeers, Introspectors, and Aware. It about how well you know yourself vs how well you understand how others see you!

It's really you vs you, where the former you is knowing what you will be doing in a situation and why,  VS how you will be perceived.  Here appreciating individuality is the key, what might work for one individual may not be perceived by another in the same fashion. How your actions are perceived plays a huge role in the emotional well-being of you and those who surround you. One uses his or her cognitive capability and situation understanding whether in a social setting or its more individualized environment. Adjusting based on physical, emotional, major, and micro factors help in establishing credibility. 

For instance, leaders might push their direct reports (or maybe folks in the social circle) to bring the best version of themselves, however, the approach used for this can't be the same, there can be a general foundational theory but that has to be improvised and tailored to appreciate talent, traits, unique quirkiness and eccentricities. We don't always have time to take a deep dive in identifying what drives them, however, it's necessary because the motivational factors for each one of them are not the same, and adding emotional sobriety helps in connecting with the team at a different level. That's where being cognizant of both internal and external self-awareness play a significant role.  

In her article, she concluded: "Leaders who focus on building both internal and external self-awareness, who seek honest feedback from loving critics, and who ask what instead of why can learn to see themselves more clearly, and reap the many rewards that increased self-knowledge delivers"

Cheers!

Rahul S.

References:

1. https://unsplash.com/photos/kfbgt78ZsVE

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

3. https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it