your self-management of emotions.
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Social Awareness of Emotions
Emotions—your own and others—are soft data as valuable as any hard data about test scores, classroom observations, or other common tools for data-informed decisions. Back to the opening scenarios in this chapter, the school principal who moved teachers among grade levels was unaware of the potential emotional impact of her decisions and therefore created conflict, unintentionally sabotaging the level of trust in the building. The following two skills are necessary when making decisions that have an impact on others.
1. Being aware of others’ emotions: Views such as, “If it’s best for students, then the adults need to deal with it” negate the way our brains work. Adults can’t simply turn off their emotions, so leaders need to be aware of undercurrents. We are wired to connect with other humans; after all, we survived saber-toothed tiger attacks by working together. In the modern workplace, researchers find that when people pause from focusing on specific tasks, their attention defaults to social cognition. We think about ourselves and our relationships (Lieberman, 2013). Think how the example of grade-level moves violated core needs such as perceiving fair treatment, being valued as individuals, and feeling safe. Social awareness lets you not just recognize emotions in others but gain insights into their root causes and potential ramifications.
2. Demonstrating empathy: There is no doubt that people want leaders who are empathetic and that it is a core skill. However, the truly empathetic leader goes beyond feeling another’s pain to being able to grasp the root causes and impact of those emotions.
Overusing empathy can cause problems just as big as underuse. In coaching and in leading, too much empathy may encourage someone to indulge too long in self-pity rather than employing skills that lead to resilience. Too much empathy can also get in the way of a leader’s independence.
Empathy has one other downside: there is a fine line between using empathy for good and using it in ways that may eventually be interpreted as manipulative. After all, if you can empathize, you know exactly how to create maximum pain. As an extreme example, psychopaths are actually capable of demonstrating high levels of this skill (Meffert, Gazzola, den Boer, Bartels, & Keysers, 2013).
Figure 3.4 (page 42) highlights some markers you can use to assess your ability with these EQ skills.
Figure 3.4: Assess your social awareness of emotions.
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Relationship Management
The first three areas of EQ skills are foundational to a leader’s biggest task—creating an environment where people are effectively engaged in working collaboratively toward a meaningful vision or purpose that inspires them personally. Effective leaders take what they know about the organization and the goals and use both strategic thinking and EQ to guide and motivate. Further, school leaders need to manage external relationships as well—with parents, the community, school district personnel, and so on.
If that sounds like a huge, nebulous responsibility, perhaps this lends weight to the premise that developing EQ is far more difficult than mastering the technical skills of leadership. Concentrating on the following two skills is an ongoing journey.
1. Building an atmosphere of emotional safety: You’ve already seen how this is key to collective teacher efficacy. People need to know they are accepted for who they are. They don’t have to change their essence to fit in and gain acceptance. Safe in an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance, they can freely seek help in meeting high expectations. Again, the leader cues this acceptance through energetic attention to conversations, ensuring that each person feels valued as an individual and establishing that this safe space for relationships is ongoing and permanent. Further, if you are the top leader in your building, department, or school district, then everyone who reports to you needs to have this same EQ competency so that people at every level experience being accepted.
2. Employing interpersonal skills: You could probably generate a long, long list of interpersonal skills to include here, but those that are most critical to the other EQ skills are active listening, working collaboratively, giving feedback, and modeling balance.
Active listening means hearing what another person is saying to understand their position, needs, circumstances, and so on. If you paraphrase what they’ve said, their reaction is, “Yes! That’s exactly what I was thinking!” This skill takes practice, since most of us listen with one ear while judging, readying a response, or critiquing with the other ear.
Collaborative skills involve being open to other points of view and different paths for reaching the same goals as you share responsibility and learn from collective reflection.
People on your teams might see providing effective feedback as being a friendly mirror. The person you are coaching grasps what he or she needs to see, and your relationship strengthens in the process.
As for modeling balance, in chapter 15 (page 195), you’ll explore more deeply how your personal approach to work–life balance, the workplace norms you can influence, and the policies and expectations you set affect not only everyone’s well-being but their ability to be energized, effective, efficient, and engaged.
Figure 3.5 highlights some markers you can use to assess your ability with these EQ skills.
Figure 3.5: Assess your relationship management.
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The EQ Skills Most Relevant to You
Figure 3.6 shows which of the eight EQ skills are most relevant to the Twelve Lenses of Leadership. Note that in any situation, any of these eight key EQ skills may be where you need to place your priorities.
Figure 3.6: The Twelve Lenses of Leadership and related EQ skills.
Three Ways to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
Consider the following three action items for reflection.
1. Look back over how you scored yourself; how others score isn’t as important as how you score each scale in relationship to the others. How would you rank your abilities with the eight areas? Use figure
