Did you miss our webinar with Ian Mercer, an Accredited Executive Coach with Merceric Executive Coaching in the UK?
If so, the session’s full transcript is now available to our members below.
Just log into your account and read what was said on leadership styles, emotional intelligence, female leadership, and building a culture of leadership in your organisation.
For now, here are a few of the event’s main highlights.
What type of leaders are there out there?
This is actually someone called Daniel Goleman, and this actually came in 2002. So, it’s quite old. But I actually use this model during my coaching sessions. And what often you get is, “I’m new to management, I’m new to leadership.” So, they’ve become a director or something like that, or they’re just put in charge of a department or a small team and they say, “So what is it? Tell me the secrets. What is it that I need to know? What is it that I need to do? Tell me all the stuff.” And the answer to that question isn’t a very easy answer. And the problem is, the answer is: It depends. And one of the things it depends on is the person yourself. It’s a very individual thing, right? So, I prefer to take a sort of a different slant on it.
Now, this was Daniel Goleman. He did a lot of work research into how people operated within organisations and the most effective way of operating in an organisation. And he came up with these six leadership styles that he called Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Commanding. So, these were the things that he sort of identified as categories. Now, these aren’t the only ways of defining leadership styles. There are all sorts of ways of doing it. But this model has a particular sort of aspect to it, which I think is quite a useful aspect, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. Now it’s called leadership styles, but I also use these, as I said, for managers, because managers often have to do these, but they may do them in a slightly different way. And quite often what I do is I say to people, “Okay, looking at those, which are your preferred ways of managing or leading?” And what quite often happens is people say, “Well, I like the Democratic one. I like to find out what people are saying. I don’t want to just come in and say, do that, do that, do that. I want to get in people’s involvement. So, it’s all about participation.” And another one would be the Affiliative, which is all about teambuilding. It’s about working within teams. So, a lot of people talk about those.
What is emotional intelligence and why is it so important for leaders to have high levels of emotional intelligence?
Yeah, interesting enough, Daniel Goleman, the chart that had the golf clubs model, he was one of the key people and this sort of came up through the nineties. And it’s called emotional intelligence or EQ, which doesn’t make any sense because what’s the Q for. It will make sense. Basically, before the nineties, back in the day, everyone thought clever people could do stuff and stupid people couldn’t. And so, what we need is clever people to be leaders and to run things. And I think there’s sort of an element of, yeah, but we know that’s not really true. I know some very stupid, clever people and the point was that everything was about IQ, intelligence quotient. So, we had an IQ, you could do anything. And what people were finding was when they were doing management was that actually high IQ is not directly related to effectiveness in an organisation or working within groups because it’s all about people and it goes back to this people thing. And so, they came up with this other idea which ended up coming up to be emotional intelligence and EQ is sort of emotional quotient and it’s something that is a much better predictor of your effectiveness within groups of people and particularly leaders. The clue there is the word emotional, and it’s all about awareness of emotions, your own emotions. So, you’re not just sort of blindly forcing your way through things. You’re aware of how things are around you, you’re aware of other things, other people’s emotions and what happened with that. It was connected to that model because a lot of those things are high emotional intelligence. The top four are all about high emotion intelligence because you can’t coach someone if you actually don’t know how they work and what they’re doing and how it’s working for them. So, it’s something that actually gives you access to those leadership styles, and it gives you access to this enabling sort of new way of looking at leadership.
What sort of things can organisations do to actually create a culture of leadership?
Yeah, I think there’s quite a lot of work on this. And I think one of the interesting concepts is called Distributed Leadership. And what that says is and it sort of goes back to this whole thing that there is someone in the team or someone in the organisation that people refer to and they are effectively exhibiting leadership. They’re not supposed to. The organisation chart shows one thing, and it says this is the person at the top, this is the person leading. They lead that bit, they lead that bit, they lead that bit. But actually, what you can do and if you’re working in an organisation, you can sort of think about who am I connected to? And you can, if you asked everybody who they were connected to and what was the most effective connections, you could draw a little diagram with all of the lines and you would find certain people would be very influential, though their position wouldn’t suggest that they would be. And so those people have leaders, have influence, and are effectively operating as a leader. And what distributed leadership says is that that actually happens all over. And actually, even though there’s someone at the top going I am the leader and you have to follow me, actually everyone is being a leader in a certain way throughout the organisation. They are leading in maybe just a small way, they are being a role model, or they are someone that people can refer to and they’re sort of reliable, they can talk to them or they inadvertently do coaching, so that people feel that that person supports them, so they don’t necessarily go to the person in the organisation chart, they go to a different person.