
The First Step Into Emotional Intelligence…
Leadership is … the ability and willingness to influence others, and be influenced by them, in order to develop people’s genius within, while delivering business results.
Self-awareness is … knowing your strengths and limitations, the willingness to seek out and act on feedback, the willingness to admit mistakes and the ability to reflect on how one’s actions impact others.
Leadership and Management are different – and complimentary.
- Leadership is about getting things right – like strategy, values, vision, mission.
- Management is teaching ordinary people how to do the right things exceptionally well – consistently – and on time.
Leadership for Einstein’s methods apply to both leaders and managers.
- To start elevating your emotional intelligence, complete the leader self- assessment in the following pages to get some insights into your leader/ manager styles.
Why?
Because the first small step to improving your leader competence is to become aware of your impact on others.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein
Some key principles:
- Leadership and management must go hand in hand.
- Workers need their managers not just to assign tasks but also to define purpose.
- Managers must organize workers, not just to maximize efficiency, and also to nurture skills, develop talent and inspire results.
Leaders’/Managers’ Achilles’ Heel – Lack of Self-Awareness & the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge tend to think that they know more than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less than they actually do.
Dunning and Kruger were awarded a 2000 Nobel Prize for their work.
The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments at Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.
Dunning–Kruger noted that in many skill areas “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
They hypothesized that with a typical skill, which people may possess in greater or lesser degree:
- Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
- Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
- Incompetent (skill specific) individuals fail to recognize the degree of their inadequacy.
- If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these people can recognize and acknowledge (become more self-aware of) their own previous lack of skill.
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessments of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor.
After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank.
- The (skill specific) competent group accurately estimated their rank.
- The (skill specific) incompetent group still over-estimated their own rank.
As Dunning and Kruger noted:
“People with true knowledge tended to underestimate their (skill specific) competence. A follow-up study suggests that grossly incompetent students improve both their skill level and their ability to estimate their class rank only after extensive, intensive tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked.”