Emotional intelligence for managing directors who don’t believe in emotional intelligence

I know lots of very technical, very brilliant and very effective managing directors who roll their eyes when they hear “emotional intelligence”. I get it. The term has been used so much, and sometimes so badly, that it sounds like an HR fad.

But it isn’t. And that’s coming from someone who lives glued to the numbers.

What Goleman says, without the hot air

Daniel Goleman, the same man behind the six leadership styles, popularised the concept in 1995. A few years later, in Harvard Business Review, he explained why it matters to an executive: in leadership roles, what separates the good from the excellent isn’t so much technical knowledge, which is taken for granted, as the way you manage yourself and others.

He summed it up in five capabilities. Here they are in a managing director’s language:

None of this is soft. It’s management.

Why it affects your P&L

Think about what a managing director without these capabilities costs:

• Heat-of-the-moment decisions that have to be undone the next day.
• Good people who leave because they can’t stand their boss. And you know retaining talent is the big challenge for any company today.
• Hidden problems, because the team is afraid of how the boss will react.
• Conflicts that escalate, because nobody sees them coming until they explode.

Each of these things has a cost. It’s just that it doesn’t appear as a line in the P&L, and that’s why it isn’t measured.

What helps me not decide in the heat of the moment

We’ve all lost our temper with someone on the team. What matters isn’t never getting angry, but not letting anger decide for you. These are the rules that help me:

1. No important decisions in the heat of the moment. If I’m angry, I give myself until the next day. Hardly anything is ruined by waiting a few hours; plenty of things are ruined by deciding in anger.
2. I ask before I judge. “What happened?” before “How could you?” Often there’s something I didn’t know.
3. I separate the person from the problem. The report arrived late; that doesn’t make anyone irresponsible.
4. If I get it wrong, I admit it. If I’ve raised my voice or been unfair, I apologise. In front of whoever was there. That doesn’t take authority away from you; it gives you it.

The technical managing director who changed

There’s a profile I see a lot in SMEs: the managing director who got there because they were the best at what they did. The best engineer, the best salesperson, the best technician. They know more about the work than anyone, and that’s why they struggle to understand why others don’t do it as well.

When that managing director starts working on these capabilities, the change is enormous. Not because they go soft, but because they start getting from their team what they used to get only by doing it themselves. And that’s where the company starts to grow beyond their diary.

It can be trained

The good news is that this isn’t a gift. It can be trained, like any other skill. It takes attention, a bit of humility and, above all, asking your team to tell you the truth about how they see you.

You don’t need to become someone else. You need the way you react to stop being an obstacle to your results.

References: Daniel Goleman, “Emotional Intelligence” (1995) and “What Makes a Leader?”, Harvard Business Review (1998).