There is a large body of research concluding that EI: Emotional Intelligence, sometimes called EQ, is highly important to and for today’s leadership. A type of leadership I am keenly interested in is Educational leadership. I teach and I govern the education system in my local community. I found this research, cited at the bottom of the email:
ON WORKER ENGAGEMENT, IN TEACHERS:
First, existing research has proven the relationship between EI and WE (worker engagement) in many research areas. WE is considered a positive motivational structure for work, consisting of absorption, dedication and vigor (Schaufeli et al., 2002), which is an important topic of concern for positive psychology (Mills et al., 2013). Job demands-resources (JD-R) theory (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017) offers an explanatory model of the relationships among WE and its antecedents and consequences. Personal resources are positively correlated with WE (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017). As a typical personal resource, EI has been recognized as a positive predictor of work engagement (Pena et al., 2012; Zhu et al., 2015; Mérida-López and Extremera, 2020). In recent years, an increasing number of studies have shown that people with high EI are able to pay attention to emotions in their surroundings and develop strategies to manage and regulate their emotions and those of others, thus creating a positive work atmosphere and maintaining a positive emotional state, resulting in increased vigor, dedication and commitment at work (Extremera et al., 2012; Bakker et al., 2014; Fu et al., 2021). For teachers, EI is considered among the greatest job-related factors for their occupational health, well-being, and WE (Hakanen et al., 2006; Mérida-López et al., 2019). Teachers with high EI can better manage their emotions with others so that they can better control their work and reduce stress and burnout at work (Nikolaou and Tsaousis, 2002; Fu et al., 2021;). Meanwhile, the EI of teachers and students also affects students’ academic engagement and performance (Carmona-Halty et al., 2021). As a profession with high emotional demands, teachers’ EI and emotional labor directly affect their WE (Bakker and Bal, 2010). Overall, previous research has demonstrated that teachers’ WE is inseparable from their EI.
I am reading one of my favourite researchers Scharmer and he works with a group of brilliant thinkers at his Institute. The consensus in regards to leadership is condensed into one word from Scharmer: “presencing” which combines being present with sensing. Deeply felt, it is the key skill that belongs to the ability to “read the room”, and that ability is the key to your EQ.
studies have shown that people with high EI are able to pay attention to emotions in their surroundings and develop strategies to manage and regulate their emotions and those of others,
This ability is a foundational predictor of success in any organization, and therefore a key to evolving humanity in general. Scharmer had a conversation with Peter Senge about systems thinking, and systems theory. Senge recounted to Scharmer this statement:
“The most profound experiences I’ve ever seen in consulting have always been when people suddenly say things like: ‘Holy cow! Look what we are doing to ourselves!’ or ‘Given the way we operate, no wonder we can’t win!’ And what is always significant to me, in those moments, is the we. Not ‘you’, not ‘them’, but we. A true systems philosophy closes the feedback loop between the human being, their experience of reality, and their sense of participation in that whole cycle of awareness and enactment.”
Scharmer responded to Senge: “The essence of systems thinking is to help people close the feedback loop between enactment of systems on a behavioural level and its source on the level of awareness and thought.” (p. 107)
Later Scharmer recounts thinking this:
What if the visible outcomes of the social field, the tangible actions, are a function of the social soil, of the interior conditions–that is, the invisible part of the field? (p. 108)
Scharmer asks questions about how we can engage with the emerging future through presencing ourselves, and the way we can predict the state of the emerging future is not the actions or tangibles yet, we can shape the emerging future through our state-through our emotional intelligence-the willingness to be present and sensing-in ourselves, all that we are and all that we aren’t.
Basically this research states that the leader’s emotional intelligence, emotional state and emotional maturity dictate the system that they are leading: organization or classroom. That these factors are the single largest indicator of the system-the emotional state of the leader dictates the state of the system.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1014…
Scharmer, C. Otto (2018) The Essentials of Theory U Berrett Koehler: Oakland CA