Leading as Your Best Self

You can’t lead effectively unless you’re leading with emotional intelligence (EQ). In today’s workplace, if you can’t respond with emotional intelligence, you’re missing the very forces that drive performance and engagement.

Daniel Goleman, who popularized the concept of emotional intelligence, defines it as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions and behaviors while also recognizing and influencing the emotions and behaviors of others. He breaks EQ into four key components:

1. Self-Awareness –
   The foundation of emotional intelligence. It’s the ability to recognize and understand your own behaviors, emotions, strengths, reactions, and values—and how they affect others. Leaders with self-awareness can assess themselves realistically and use that insight to guide their behavior and decisions.
2. Self-Management –
   The ability to pause rather than react. It involves staying in control, adapting to change, thinking before acting, and maintaining integrity under pressure. Emotionally intelligent people manage their emotions and actions constructively.
3. Social Awareness –
   The ability to understand others’ emotions and perspectives and to empathize with them. It includes empathy (understanding others’ feelings and viewpoints) and organizational awareness (understanding the emotional dynamics and power relationships within a group or workplace).
4. Relationship Management –
   The skill of using awareness of your own and others’ emotions to manage interactions effectively. This includes influencing, inspiring, and developing others, managing conflict, building teamwork, and communicating with empathy and clarity.

In Goleman’s framework, these four dimensions work together to shape how well people lead, collaborate, and connect. Self-awareness and self-regulation create inner mastery, while social awareness and relationship management enable effective relationships and leadership.

As an executive coach, I help leaders and sales professionals master these four dimensions. I’m aided in this work by advanced people analytics—specifically the Harrison Assessment—which provides comprehensive insight into how effectively a person behaves within each dimension.

In the second edition of my book, Getting the People Equation Right: How to Get the Right People in the Right Jobs and Keep Them, I propose five commitments that help leaders strengthen and sustain emotional intelligence.

My hope is that leaders commit to mastering the dimensions of emotional intelligence and lead as their best selves—because when a leader leads with emotional intelligence, everyone wins.