The OBA Young Lawyers Gala will be held on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. The event will be a unique social event uniting the next generation of legal influencers. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh will be speaking on leadership.
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What makes a good leader?
In the Harvard Business Review “10 Must Reads: On Emotional Intelligence“, Daniel Goleman writes about what makes a good leader. He concludes that there are three crucial ingredients: technical skill, IQ, and emotional intelligence.
Goleman writes that although technical skill and IQ matter, they are simply the entry requirements for a leadership position. Emotional intelligence is the most crucial ingredient. “Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”
When Goleman calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others.
Goleman defines emotional intelligence skills as:
- self-awareness: knowing one’s strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, and impact on others;
- self-regulation: controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods;
- motivation: relishing achievement for its own sake;
- empathy: understanding other people’s emotional makeup; and
- social skill: building rapport with others to move them in desired directions.
Goleman’s research showed that emotional intelligence played an increasingly important role at the highest levels of a company, where differences in technical skills were of negligible importance. When he compared star performers with average ones, nearly 90% of the difference in their profiles was attributable to their emotional intelligence rather than their cognitive abilities.
(Views are my own and do not represent the views of any organization.)
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