Intelligent leadership

Leadership development continues to be a major focus as organisations recognise the important role managers play in implementing change. Recent work with a global pharmaceutical company has led to ongoing development of a program focusing on the underlying emotional intelligence abilities that impact leadership effectiveness. Intelligent Leadership™ looks at how emotions impact Transformational leadership behaviours. This one-day program builds on the work of Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio in their research around Transformational and Transactional leadership. In addition, it applies recent Australian research in the area of emotional intelligence to give participants the skills needed to enhance their leadership capability through EI development.

A group of national marketing managers experienced Intelligent Leadership™ first hand in Sydney recently. They were looking for a program that would focus on skill development rather than academic theory and they wanted some up-front insight into how they were currently dealing with some of the challenges of leading others day-to-day.

Our approach to developing these skills was simple. Firstly, we conducted a 40 minute participant briefing session outlining what effective leadership looks like, how EI relates to leadership and an overview of the next steps. We then had each participant complete the Emotional Intelligent Questionnaire (EIQ) self-survey on-line. Next, each participant received an individual one-to-one debrief session so they could better interpret their self-report and undertake some individual development planning prior to the one-day workshop.

The workshop focused on understanding the link between EI and leadership behaviours as well as developing strategies to better understand one’s own emotions, the emotions of others and how to moderate unhelpful emotions. Throughout the day participants were exposed to a variety of activities that challenged and engaged their understanding of leadership behaviours and provided new approaches to resolving challenging workplace issues. Participants left the workshop with a tailored approach for applying and reinforcing relevant EI abilities in the workplace.

Some comments from participants include:

Great course, very valuable

This will help me build on my influencing skills

Excellent application of EI in real life corporate examples

Good ideas, relevant and transferable, thought provoking

Good pace to encourage thinking and application

Fantastic - highly recommended