Most dentist-entrepreneurs with whom I work, have few if any years to prepare for the job of a corporate leader. As practice owners they are basically operational managers, getting the business and clinical operations to perform so patients are taken care of and money is made. They never learned the basic lesson that being a great corporate leader is far more important than being a good do-er.
Those who become great corporate leaders have stories to tell about stumbling along the way, about micromanaging people, about destroying a team’s morale with unreasonable demands, about losing a great team member because not enough time and attention weren’t given to the relationship.
My finding is that feelings (moods and emotions) play a central role in the leadership process. More specifically, it is proposed that emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage moods and emotions in oneself and others, are fundamental and critical to great leadership.
Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman first brought the term “emotional intelligence” to a wide audience with his 1995 book of the same name, and Goleman first applied the concept to business on a classic HBR article in 1998. In his research at nearly 200 large global companies, Goleman found that truly effective leaders are distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence. Without it, a person can have first-class training, an incisive mind, and an endless supply of good ideas, but he still won’t be a great leader.
The chief components of emotional intelligence (self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill) can sound “unbusinesslike,” but Goleman found direct ties between emotional intelligence and measurable business results. Goleman’s HBR article remains the definitive reference on the subject, with a detailed discussion of each component of emotional intelligence, how to recognize it in potential leaders, how and why it connects to performance, and how it can be learned.
From my experience, I see that corporate leaders with high emotional intelligence generate strong relationships of kinship, trust, affinity and loyalty. Those with low emotional intelligence relate to employees more as objects, resulting in employees feeling discounted, unheard, uncared for and unappreciated. It’s easy to tell high emotional intelligence in leaders from those with low emotional intelligence – the vast difference in turnover rate and job satisfaction of employees.
Dentist-entrepreneurs excel in management, especially when it is about strategy, tactics and directing action. How people feel or what is going on for them emotionally is not on their radar. They don’t provide an “empathetic listening,” so they don’t hear what is occurring for people emotionally. Getting the job done is their only focus – they are not thinking about having their people in good shape emotionally.
A practical example is when people are mildly upset, their thought processes and focus are directly distracted by the upset. Their work product, their relationships, their level of commitment are all diminished. A leader who cannot perceive a person is upset, who just goes on with their agenda as if everything is OK, will not produce the desired committed action in the person.
Engendering emotional intelligence is quintessential to being a great leader. When one has the capacity to intuit, feel, perceive, discern, sense what is going for people, it gives them a whole other dimension to interact with people. When a leader can “get” what is going on for another person, upsets and conflicts can be addressed and therefore resolved or greatly reduced, allowing an uncluttered pathway for communication and effective action.
See an interesting video on emotional intelligence:
https://hbr.org/video/4421646384001/the-explainer-emotional-intelligence
