Emotional Intelligence: The Engine Behind the Four I’s

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

Idealized Influence, Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation, and Individualized Consideration all sound achievable in theory. In practice, they run on a single underlying capability: the leader’s ability to read and manage their own emotions and other people’s. That capability has a name, and a substantial research base of its own.

What Emotional Intelligence Actually Is

Goleman (1995) popularised emotional intelligence as a set of competencies distinct from cognitive intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. In a later Harvard Business Review analysis, Goleman (1998) went further, arguing that emotional intelligence was twice as important as technical skill and IQ combined in distinguishing outstanding leaders from average ones, across the roles he studied. The claim was controversial partly because it is hard to prove precisely, but the underlying pattern, that technically brilliant people regularly fail as leaders for emotional rather than technical reasons, is something most experienced managers have watched happen at least once.

Where It Shows Up in Practice

Supporting a client organisation through a tense leadership transition, I watched a newly appointed manager consistently pause before responding to provocative comments in meetings, visibly regulating their own reaction rather than matching the room’s tension. That single habit, self-regulation under pressure, did more to stabilise the team than any restructuring decision made that quarter. People calibrate how safe a situation is largely by watching how the leader in the room is reacting.

A Connection to My Own Findings

While my MALIC research (Kallmyr, 2017) did not measure emotional intelligence directly, the transformational behaviours it did measure, particularly Individualized Consideration and the trust-building behaviours discussed two articles ago, are difficult to enact without the empathy and self-awareness Goleman describes. The Four I’s are, in that sense, emotional intelligence made operational.

Building the Skill

• Name your own emotional state silently before responding in a tense meeting; the pause alone changes the response.
• Ask a trusted colleague, directly, how your reactions land under pressure; most leaders overestimate their own composure.
• Practise listening for the feeling behind a complaint, not only the content of it.

References

• Goleman, D. (1995) Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
• Goleman, D. (1998) ‘What Makes a Leader?’, Harvard Business Review, 76(6), pp. 93-102.
• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant with a background spanning telecom, e-commerce, and public sector transformation. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.