When it comes to communication, teachers are like everyone else: When they listen to or interact with their leader, they want to feel inspired. Many school leaders are good at inspiring an audience with articulate, rousing speeches, but research shows that what’s more important are the small, everyday interactions that are driven less by rhetorical talent and more by emotional intelligence.
In their latest Research Says column for Educational Leadership, McREL’s Bryan Goodwin and Heather Hein look at what emotional intelligence is and how it bolsters leadership at any organization. Defined by Salovey and Mayer as the ability to monitor one’s own emotions and the emotions of others and use this information to guide interactions with others (1990), emotional intelligence appears to distinguish good leaders from great ones.
For instance, when writer/psychologist Daniel Goleman conducted an analysis of the competency models of 188 large companies, he found that, among the important ingredients of excellence performance—technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence—emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels. Further, the higher an employee’s level in a company, the more important it became. As Goleman noted: “Without [emotional intelligence], a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”
To read more about the links between the emotional intelligence of school leaders and school performance, get the entire article here.
Posted by McREL International.
