Emotional Intelligence
Initial Post – In the article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and the six styles of leadership. Think about your EI and how it guides your leadership style. Identify the leadership style you think is most appropriate for your business. What secondary style might be complementary? Which competencies do you want to improve to enhance your EI? Support your answer with information from your DiSC assessment results.
PART A – PLEASE RESPOND TO CLASSMATE DISCUSSION WHETHER YOU AGREE OR NOT & A DETAILED WHY: My leadership style for the current business is authoritative. The team is successful with a high-level vision and goal; then, the leaders have autonomy to weave through the goal with support. The secondary leadership style would be pacesetting. In a result-driven business-like transportation or retail-based operation, results are part of the game — the expectation of high standards implemented from the entire team, top-down, and bottom-up. From the EI perspective, my most active skills are self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation. I am a motivated person, by nature-I would not consider it part of a leadership or learned behavior. I thoroughly enjoy business and the motivation of people, process, and communication. Over the last decade, I would say I have honed these skills. However, I incorporate the skills day today. There are days where I utilize and empower the skills better than the other. An opportunity core skill would be social skills, while in the professional workspace, this is the nature of the business; from a personal perspective incorporating social networking within new places could be better. Emotional Intelligence was vital to a leader within our organization; we took exams and classes to support and hone the skills. In my experience, utilizing 100% of the time should be a core skill, as well.
In the operations, learning to manage your own emotions creates success to ensure the correct emotions are utilized. In my experience, this was a critical element for me. While in my element of operations, my passion for the business and success of my team led to misunderstandings early within my career. The emotional actions I displayed resembled combativeness, which was not intended to display. Learning through EI helped me understand my perception as well as how to respond to the actions of others. My DISC assessment categorized my profile as D and I, I asked my one of my previous supervisors, and she would rate me as CDI which is closer to the original assessment I received from my place of employment. My results align with both the authoritative leadership and pacesetting: high energy results and motivation being the large token items for success. Ultimately, I relate to the skills motivation, and the D relates to the directness and performance-based skill sets.
PART B – PLEASE RESPOND TO CLASSMATE DISCUSSION WHETHER YOU AGREE OR NOT & A DETAILED WHY: When I consider myself and the current role that I play within my business I believe that the leadership style that I find myself using the most is the pacesetting style. As a CS Supervisor I am often required to help my teammates and peers solve difficult problems as well as complete projects to help support the business. I have a few teammates who are very driven and eager to contribute their talents, while others are not so eager or willing to help. I often find myself putting more effort towards working with an helping my teammates who are eager to help while avoiding working with those who are not willing to contribute. In the past my leaders have provided feedback to me directly about my leadership approach in such situations. They have often explained to me that not everyone within our small group has the same work ethic or drive as myself. I have always felt like they in a sense were asking me to lower my expectations of certain teammates in order to keep peace within the group. As a CS style this is often very hard for me to do because I can tend to be over analyze situations and become overly critical. I will admit that I did not have a high sense of self-awareness when dealing with my teammates. When presenting issues or areas were we fail short in meetings, I relied on my candor to address the issues but I failed to consider the manner in which I address them. If I was more self-aware, I could have recognized the emotions that I may have stirred up amongst the team. I could have also used this as a chance to self-regulate those emotions and motivate my teammates rather than causing a rift within the team.
In addition to using the pacesetting style within my current role I could also use the coaching style as a secondary style to complement the pacesetting style already in use. The coaching style would be beneficial within my role because it would allow me to help my teammates who are not as driven to improve in areas that they are lacking. To use this style, I would need to be very self-aware of their emotions and empathic to the feelings. I would also be sure to motivate them to push forward and improve their work. I believe that the coaching style would also challenge me to improve my overall emotional intelligence, because the focus would be on helping my teammates improve to excellence rather than only demanding excellence and taking over the situation when it is not meet like the pacesetting style.
Solution Preview
Leadership Styles Response
Emotional intelligence is a significant tool forany leader, as itfacilitates the quality of interaction between the leader and the team. Considering that my ideal leadership style falls within the transformational leadership category, it remains clear that I understand the followers’ interests and approach different issues from such a perspective.
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