Leaders in business looking to improve their organisation’s performance can do so by improving their emotional intelligence: that is, their skill at identifying, understanding and influencing emotion.

There is a direct link between the way people feel and the way they perform at work. This is one of the most robust and consistent findings in organisational research. In high performing organisations people feel significantly more engaged, cared for, valued, proud, and motivated than those in low performing organisations. Conversely, in low performing organisations people feel significantly more fearful, stressed, disempowered and uncertain.

Leadership is fundamentally about facilitating performance. Research has proven that a leader’s emotional intelligence is key to their capacity to facilitate emotions in others that drive high performance and employee engagement. This is more than just a moral compass; it’s also a recipe for success. Organisations with emotionally intelligent leaders achieve a critical lever of sustainable competitive advantage: a high performance culture and customer loyalty.

Emotionally intelligent leadership competencies reflect what leaders do with their emotional intelligence in the leadership of people.

For instance, Inspiring Performance is important in leadership because:

• Leadership is fundamentally about facilitating the performance of others,
• Managing performance with rules and key performance indicators usually produces an ‘expected’, result, rather than an ‘unexpected’ high performance result, and
• People often learn and develop more with this type of leadership style resulting in continuous enhancements to performance year-on-year.