392 | Emotional Intelligence for Visionary Leaders

Emotional intelligence is a big buzzword now. I want to give you my take on what is emotional intelligence for leadership. I am honored to engage with hundreds of clients over the last few years. I see behind the scenes with those that in the trenches. I find that every person on some level has some improvements they can make with their emotional intelligence. I want to give you some practical insights on how to raise your game and improve your emotional intelligence.

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Emotional Intelligence for Visionary Leaders: The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

Emotional intelligence. What does it mean for your leadership? What does it mean for the company and how do you improve your emotional intelligence? Well, that’s the topic for today. We’re gonna unpack that little bit, give you a specific thing that you can do to improve your emotional intelligence and then I’m going to help you apply that to others inside the workforce. So, a little bit of introduction.

My name’s Gene Hemmett. I work with hyper growth companies. I have seven clients in the Inc. 5000 the last couple years and really excited about working with them through leadership and culture issues that they face every time they’re going through the stress and the anxiety of fast growth. So, I started out talking about emotional intelligence.

A lot of different definitions around this but it really is about your deep awareness and control of emotions when you need to. And the awareness part is really just knowing what you’re experiencing and being able to tap into that and check yourself with that, without flying off the handle and just being angry. Knowing that you’re moving into this and controlling it means being able to bring the right emotion to the right conversation when you need to it. Or maybe it’s not even a conversation. Maybe it’s just the work that you’re doing.

I work with a lot of creatives and these companies have to be creative and most of that, I won’t say all, but most of the creativity doesn’t come through anger. It comes through reflection. It comes through peaceful and it really is about creating a space for that.

So, no matter what type of person you are, what type of work you do, having emotional intelligence as a leader is very important. Knowing that you have a capacity for it right now is first and foremost because you all have emotions and if you let it get to you, if you let those emotions really drain you and pull energy away from what you’re doing and impact others, then you are lacking the high control for that emotional intelligence. So you may have a low emotional intelligence.

You want to raise that up by just being aware of some of the things that go on within your emotions. I’m gonna use one specifically here because this happens a lot. Guilt. Many times leaders aren’t willing to take the day off because they’re worried about what their team might think for them. Maybe you take the day off for a really good reason, to read a book or to go to a conference or something like that, some employees get into your brain that you feel guilty leaving them with all the work to do. You may not have that exact one but you probably felt guilt before. I know for me, where guilt used to come into play, would be about six o’clock, I would feel my energy just absolutely gone. I’ve left everything out on the playing field, you know, from seven a.m. ’til six p.m. and I just couldn’t work anymore.

I couldn’t bring the creative energies to write. I couldn’t really respond to emails the way I really wanted to with the thoughtfulness that’s required. And I would hold guilt about taking the night off. Now this happened for months and months and months and my coach put a spotlight on this guilt and said what would it be like if you let go of that? And I said oh, that’s be great. Well, I thought to myself, and I see all of my clients that go through different things, battles with guilt and other emotions and what would it be like to let go of that?

Well, that’s emotional intelligence, being able to be aware of it and being able to control it really can help you be the leader that you want to be. Now, in this case with the guilt, I was able to make a decision that I really did need to recharge. I really did need to start the next day fresh and that was really important to me and so I let go of that, almost immediately.

Like, just putting that conversation into context about why I was doing it was necessary for me to let go of the guilt and I was able to grow from there and I say grow because it was really about me not harboring that guilt every night that have to go through this. And I just said okay, now is down time. It’s family time. Or I can just spend the time really relaxing and being myself, maybe it’s reading a book, and that’s a little bit of an example from my life but where is your emotions getting control of you? How can you stop it? Well, first, you’ve got to be aware.

You’ve got to put a spotlight on it. Maybe you have a coaching relationship that you’re working with right now, maybe you don’t. Maybe you have someone you could ask questions, like, you know, what do I do when I feel like this? Or what do you see from me? And you just want to be much more aware about catching yourself in those moments that you don’t want to feed into the business or into other relationships inside your life ’cause if you carry guilt into this, it impacts the family and that’s what it was doing to me,, just being honest. So, I want you to really think about what this means for you as a leader.

But secondly, I want you to really think about if you’re able to be that coach to your employees and you have a check of your own emotions, your emotional intelligence, could you ask questions to help them get in check around theirs?

That is a great leader. So, that’s my take today. Having emotional intelligence for a leader is really important and raising it to the next level is all about you being able to be honest with yourself and having real conversations with someone that you can trust around that.

All right, so if you have any of these issues are really resonating with you, you’d love to have a conversation about your business, make sure you reach out to me at genehammett.com. I’d love to get to know you. You can go check out me at genehammett.com and if there’s anything in there that I can help you with, just make sure you let me know. As always, lead with courage, and I’ll see you next time.

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

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