Leadership
Cultural Dimensions of Leadership
February 12, 2025
The Emotionally Intelligent Manager
The emotionally intelligent manager is one who has an inner rudder, defers gratification, and is empathic towards his or her coworkers. An emotionally intelligent manager creates a working environment that is as much driven by performance as it is by greater cooperation and greater sensitiveness towards each other.
In other words, an emotionally intelligent manager creates a working environment is free from rancor and prejudice and at the same time is characterized by high performance that emanates from the ability to focus on results and at the same time not swayed by petty conflicts.
The point here is that the emotionally intelligent manager manages his or her employees according to their needs for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation apart from making them realize their true potential by targeting their need for self-actualization. This means that an emotionally intelligent manager ensures performance through empathy, awareness, and emotional connect between the employees rather than mere performance driven by cold calculations of profits and bottom lines.
The Spiritually Aware Manager
We have discussed the characteristics of emotionally intelligent managers. Continuing along the same lines, the spiritually intelligent manager derives performance through understanding, support, and targeting the innate strengths of the employees.
Whereas an emotionally intelligent manager is able to derive high performance through empathy and awareness of the employees’ needs, the spiritually intelligent manager is able to derive performance through the premise that each individual has talents that can manifest themselves through nurturing and mentoring.
The point here is that in many organizations, it is the case that the working environment is characterized by intense competition and driven solely by profits. However, emotional and spiritual intelligence can also result in higher profits because by targeting the latent potential of employees, it is possible to make them perform at their best.
In other words, contemporary management thought is finally recognizing the fact that emotionally and spiritually intelligent managers are a boon and an asset to the organizations as they have the ability to get the best out of people in a manner that leads to a workplace that is fulfilling for the employees.
Further, emotional, and spiritual intelligence are very much needed in these turbulent times when the obsession about profits alone has us into a situation where humanistic values have been abandoned in the pursuit of money and greed.
The Need for Emotional Quotient or EQ and Spiritual Quotient or SQ
The key aspect about EQ or Emotional Quotient and SQ or Spiritual Quotient is that these terms mean that organizations have to move from competition to cooperation and from sympathy to empathy if they are to survive the challenges of the 21s century. Considering the fact that the world now needs these qualities more than the pursuit of profit alone, it is the case that EQ and SQ are very much needed if we are to survive the present times.
Further, change takes time and must be accompanied by nurturing and patience and therefore, SQ and EQ are badly needed for our species to make the next evolutionary leap.
The point to be noted here is that unless we move to the next level of our evolution through awareness, understanding, support, empathy, and cooperation, we are likely to miss the chance in our collective evolution.
Further, challenges like social and environmental concerns can only be met through the actualization of these aspects and therefore, there is an urgent need to embrace EQ and SQ among managers and employees.
Concluding Remarks
Finally, while we do not advocate abandoning the need to make profits and say that there must be utopia, we mean to say that unless the working environment becomes something closer to humaneness and is more towards actualizing one’s potential, we are likely to move on the same path that is leading us to ruin.