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In the Zone This Month: September 2009

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Self-Awareness: The Missing Link to Effective Leadership

by Thomas G. Reed, Ph.D. and Paul C. Reed, M.A.

Introduction

James MacGregor Burns suggests that leadership is “one of the most often observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”1 Putting his theory to the “Google test” more than 30 years later, there are more than four million scholarly articles, over 185,000 books, and precisely 37,541,718 blog references for a simple search of the term “leadership.” By comparison, a search of “decision making” yielded nearly half the number of scholarly articles, less than one-third of the book references, and 10 million fewer blog references. “Change,” on the other hand, returned 7,730,000, 954,600, and 200,946,720, respectively.

Conceptualized for centuries from managerial to militant, parliamentary to political, formal to informal, transactional to transformational, the study of leadership continues to attract the attention of researchers, scholars, and practitioners alike and seems to consistently center on the question: What makes a leader effective or ineffective?

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

One contemporary perspective proposes six distinct leadership styles based on emotional intelligence along two dimensions: task orientation and relation orientation. Two of the styles, authoritarian and pacesetting leadership, are described as high in task but low in relation. Two others, affiliative and democratic leadership, are high in relation but low in task. The final two, visionary and coaching leadership, integrate varying levels of both task and relation. It is a mindful mix of these six emotional intelligence leadership styles that is critical to the perceived effectiveness of a leader.2

As originally theorized, emotional intelligence refers to an individual’s ability to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions in a way that informs and guides leadership behavior, drives decision-making processes, and regulates a leader’s deployment of power and authority.3 The resulting leadership behavior, guided largely by an individual’s emotional intelligence capacity, can have both positive (resonant) or negative (dissonant) effects on a school.4

Resonant leadership is described as visionary, affiliative, democratic, and supportive through coaching, behaviors that consistently and positively affect school climate. Visionary leaders are empathic, self-confident, and often act as agents of change. Affiliative leaders, too, exhibit empathy while demonstrating strengths in building relationships and managing conflict. The democratic leader encourages collaboration and teamwork and communicates effectively. The coaching leader tends to be emotionally self-aware, empathic, and skilled at identifying and building on the potential of others.5

On the other hand, dissonant leadership styles, including authoritarian and pacesetting leaders, tend to degrade organizational climate over time. Authoritarian leaders rely on the formal positional power to execute performance goals, and typically they exhibit a lack of empathy. The pacesetting leader, by contrast, sets high standards and exemplifies them, exhibiting initiative and a very high drive to achieve. However, the pacesetting leader often micromanages or criticizes individuals who fail to meet established standards rather than helping them to improve.6

Style	Descriptors	Objective	When Appropriate
Authoritarian	Drive to achieve, initiative, emotional self-control	Immediate compliance	In a crisis, or to kick-start a turnaround
Affiliative	Self-confidence; empathy; change catalyst	Mobilize around a vision	When change requires a new vision, or when a clear direction is needed
Visionary	Empathy, building bonds, conflict management	Create harmony	To heal rifts in a team or to motivate during stressful times
Democratic	Collaboration; team leadership; communication	Commitment through participation	To build consensus, solicit input from employees
Pacesetting	Conscientiousness; drive to achieve; initiative	High performance, excellence	To get quick results from a highly motivated and competent team
Coaching	Developing others; empathy; emotional self-awareness	Build capacity, strengths	To help an employee improve performance or develop long-term strengths

School leadership studies reveal the most effective principals integrate four or more of the six styles regularly, switching to the one most appropriate in a given situation. In schools where principals displayed four or more leadership styles, students had superior academic performance than schools where principals displayed just one or two styles.7

Interestingly, regardless of the leadership style deployed at any given time, two emotional intelligence descriptors prove most influential in distinguishing great leaders from notorious ones, effective from ineffective: emotional self-awareness and emotional self-control. In practice, effective leaders not only possess high levels of Emotional Intelligence, they understand which emotions are stoked by which situations, understand the implications of their emotional reactions to those stimuli, and demonstrate the ability to manage disruptive emotions and keep impulses in check. By doing so, leaders more effectively regulate their power and authority, apply efficient decision-making processes, assume appropriate orientations to organizational tasks and individual needs, and increase their likelihood to positively affect the climate and outcomes of the organization.8

Natural Inclination and Leadership

Another characterization of leadership, largely attributed to a more general application of natural inclinations, examines the relationship between Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance dimensions of leader behavior. Dominance refers to how people respond to problems or challenges; influence refers to how effective leaders are getting others to see their point of view. Steadiness is how people respond to the pace of their environment, and compliance captures how people respond to rules and procedures. All people exhibit all four behavioral factors in varying degrees of intensity. No one is one dimensional, and no combination proves to be any better than any other in predicting leadership effectiveness. Instead, each combination illuminates a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and it is one’s accurate self-assessment that provides insight into situational flexibility.9

The confounding paradox for leaders is that, although a predominance of any of the four behavioral factors manifests obvious leadership strength, it simultaneously exposes the same individual to naturally threatening and potentially destructive practices. Simply stated, the same characteristics that define exemplars of leadership are also potential enemies of leadership.10

So what?

Consider, for example, leaders who frequently demonstrate high levels of Dominance. These leaders are often heralded for readily responding to problems or challenges with decisiveness and authority. But at the same time, if these leaders are overly attentive to tasks and goals, they are most likely to be perceived as apathetic to individual needs. Perceived arrogance and insensitivity are enemies of leadership that erode trust between a leader and follower and, over time, render followers unresponsive and a leader ineffective. As a result, leaders who are naturally inclined to drive others for results must occasionally remind themselves to cultivate relationships within the organization and not minimize the importance of people to the quality of the work.

Conversely, the leader who possesses admirable inclinations for Steadiness is highly regarded by followers for minimizing risk and maximizing security on behalf of the members of the organization. These individuals are people centered and highly loyal and empathetic. Paradoxically, if always remaining in this natural comfort zone of Steadiness, a leader risks being perceived as indecisive, unimaginative, and too accepting of mediocrity as a means to preserve the peace. A highly self-aware leader will understand the need to maintain standards of excellence, even if it means occasional disharmony, and may need to seek out assistance from more creative forces to push through the ordinary.

Highly influential leaders, resoundingly and rightfully applauded for being visionary and inspirational, often risk being perceived as willfully ignorant, inefficient, and duplicitous or deceitful. If those perceptions allowed to persist, these individuals will be regarded as leaders who overpromise and underdeliver. Although these may seem like excessively harsh criticisms, they are characteristics that squarely threaten the leader’s integrity. Leaders who are self-aware of their most natural inclinations to influence others must make conscious efforts to follow through on promises, meet deadlines, and be transparent and authentic in their interactions with others.

The opposite of the influential leader is one who is most at ease with Compliance. Clearly, adherence to rules, routines, systems, and structured processes are necessary qualities in an effective leader and are highly valued and rewarded in virtually every leadership role. However, overly compliant leaders risk inflexibility and rigidity, leading to goal displacement and performance perversion. Instead of focusing on the quality of the work as the measure of success, success is defined by the way individuals follow rules, policies, and procedures. Leaders who understand they possess this need for compliance, conformity, and order must remind themselves of essential outcomes and allow room for the spontaneous and, at times, messy means to pursue and fulfill the core mission of the organization.

Conclusion

Though somewhat distinct in how each characterizes leadership behavior, both the emotional intelligence and natural inclination frameworks maintain that no specific combination of behaviors or traits inherently determine leadership effectiveness and ineffectiveness. Rather it is the interplay of task-oriented and people-oriented situations and individually generated responses informed by a certain level and degree of accuracy of self-assessment of predominant behavioral tendencies and competencies that ultimately determines perceived leader effectiveness.

Effective school leaders know when to be decisive or deferential, inspiring or introspective, commanding or compliant, momentous or measured, and they deploy strategies, natural or otherwise, that meet the demands of any given situation. Leaders who are self-aware and continually and accurately self-assess clearly understand how their capabilities may also be their limitations. Self-aware leaders seek out feedback in order to improve, use past mistakes to regulate future responses, and value others who exhibit complementary skills, traits, styles, and dispositions.

Dr. Thomas G. Reed is the Executive Director for the Center for Achievement and Leadership Services at the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio in Columbus, Ohio. A recovering superintendent and high school principal, he also serves as lecturer at The Ohio State University School of Educational Policy and Leadership where he teaches Introduction to Education Administration and other graduate-level courses for aspiring school administrators.

Paul C. Reed is Vice-President of Behavioral Research and Development at HG Worldwide© in Dayton, Ohio. Prior to that, he dutifully served in both public and private education for more than 2 decades in a broad spectrum of district and building leadership positions and has delivered behavioral training programs to countless clients across the globe.

References

• Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.
• Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
• Mayer, J.D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What Is Emotional Intelligence? In P. Salovey & D. J. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence. New York: Basic Books.
• Goleman et al, (2002).
• Goleman et al, (2002)
• Goleman et al, (2002)
• Hay/McBer. (2000). Research into teacher effectiveness: A model of teacher effectiveness report by Hay McBer to the Department for Education and Employment. Report prepared by Hay/McBer for the government of the United Kingdom. http://www.dfee.gov.uk/teachingreforms/mcber/
• Haygroup. (2004). Driving personal and professional development. Boston: Accreditation Training.
• Marston, W. M. (1979). Emotions of Normal People. Minneapolis, MN: Persona Press, Inc.
• Bogue, G. (1985). The Enemies of Leadership: Lessons for Leaders in Education. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa.

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