Years ago you would find people in the workplace who were technically brilliant but had awful people skills. In the past, organizations lived with these people and adapted around them. The instances of this happening are far fewer now. More workplaces recognize that employees must have both technical skills as well as the social skills of working in teams and of leading others.
Emotional Intelligence matters more than intellectual intelligence in most avenues of life. Surprisingly to some, having a high emotional intelligence can support developing high academic success. Interestingly, it often works the opposite way for high intellectual intelligence, in that this can often get in the way of developing emotional intelligence. Through our physical and social development, we are taught to ignore or subdue our emotional side. Through this, our subconscious learns to ignore the sensations in our body associated with emotional messages and we short-circuit our emotional learning. Hence Fritz Perl's statement "we must lose our minds and come to our senses."
How we engage others, beyond the mental construct of a vision, is done through our emotional body. This complex set of responses gives us a mechanism through which to connect with others, and in particular for leaders, influence others. The limbic engagement that occurs when we walk into another’s physical space, or even enter their consciousness in some cases, is what enables us to take sympathetic action. By sympathetic action, we mean that as a group, we take actions related to an affinity, interdependence, or mutual association. Our actions occur like a jam session among musicians. There is a commonality of key, progression, and tempo, with members connected through the rapport of the music, co-creating something that none of them could have done on their own.
To have this connection, we need to be transparent and authentic. People need to be able to experience the real you, and understand how you sincerely feel about things. It requires practice to “thin the walls” that basically hide our emotionality, as well as a great deal of courage to allow ourselves to be seen in this light. However, it is absolutely essential. This requires living through your sensory data more than through your intellect.
Infants live through sensory intelligence and basic emotional intelligence. Our first interactions are done through empathic contact with our mothers, and then expand to include others. As language development enters the mix, we begin to rely more on the symbolic code of language than on the sensory data of emotions. Further to this, we are socialized to contain our hot emotions and live more through our cool logic. This does make for a more stable and predictable environment, but carries a negative side effect. If you look at early child development and socialization through school systems, it is very common to teach children to suppress their emotions. This approach gets compliant and quiet children, but leaves behind an under-developed set of emotional responses and results in a great number of people who operate from an emotional body that closely approximates the skill set they had when they were five.
Implicitly, as people age, their hormonal changes and maturity tend to temper these emotions, so they are not as prone to break free as when we are adolescents or young adults. The issue, though, is that most people learn to suppress and repress their emotions to keep them under control. At the same time, it usually does not support a person to have childish emotional reactions showing up in our adult relationships, so we learn to build walls to contain and hide them. These walls seem to serve us from a protection standpoint, but in our relationships, actually prevent us from getting the sort of authentic contact that will really allow us to engage others deeply and fully.
At the same time, these same education processes that have created vast cognitive and logical resources have tended to teach our minds to ignore our emotions. As a result, many people have no idea what they are feeling at any given time. You can experience a person who is deeply angry, or worse, resentful, who has bottled that emotion up, ignored it, and let it build pressure in their body. If you are entering empathic rapport with this person, you will feel the tension. You will see it in their face. If it is chronic over years, you may even see deep lines in their faces from habitually holding that tension.
For this person to lead through their presence they must enter into a time of emotional education. This is a period of deep personal growth that will impact every area of their life. The good news is that it will make an overall positive difference. This sort of a journey can cause unhealthy relationships to end, and can open the door to positive and emotionally rewarding relationships, both in private and public life. To be a leader of other people’s hearts and minds, it is a required journey.
