Does Women’s Emotional Intelligence Help Us Get Into Leadership?

Is women’s emotional intelligence (EQ) likely to help you or hurt you when you’re on the leadership track? How well do you handle your emotions at work?

Too many women and men read that question as a damnation of women who can’t control their emotions in the office. In fact, it’s more important that you learn to use your emotions intentionally at work, than merely control them. And in the ability to use their emotions, both women and men have a potential advantage.

We might even start with, “Do your emotions help you do your job better?” They do! Emotional Intelligence is one of the most important business and leadership assets you can develop, but emotional intelligence doesn’t always look as “emotional” as most people think. Often, it’s the more subtle emotional clues that give you the “intelligence” to decode a tricky interpersonal situation, read a negotiating partner or motivate challenging employees (and employees in challenging situations.)

How does understanding emotional clues make you a good leader?

Here’s a short list:

• Reduce stress (yours and others’)
• Build win-win relationships
• Motivate yourself and others
• Communicate more effectively
• Give and receive constructive feedback
• Run meetings
• Handle difficult situations and people

I often hear people say that women’s emotional intelligence is more acute than men’s. Any broad generalization like this is going to be easily proven wrong, but it’s true that women do tend to be good at empathy, social cues, collaboration. However, men tend to be better at managing difficult and stressful emotions in social situations, including not allowing too much emotional empathy keep them from taking needed action. So maybe a direct comparison is less useful than an assumption that we all have emotional intelligence and that we can all become better at using it. In fact, given how important EQ is for being a good leader (according to all the leadership gurus out there), if women had all the EQ they needed, wouldn’t we be better represented in leadership than we are?

Get ahead strategy: use your emotions intelligently – Click To Tweet

As you can probably already tell, I’m a big believer in emotional intelligence as a coach and I see many opportunities for women to refine their natural emotional talent. I’m not talking about emotions like crazy-in-love or seeing-red-anger. I’m talking about the emotional clues that help you understand yourself and others better. Intelligence like this comes in handy when you’re trying to suss out things like:

• when people are buying into what you’re saying and when they’re holding back without saying so directly;
• when you’re genuinely excited and want to go for a new assignment and when you’re not interested but likely to do a poor job because you think you “should” do it even though you’re heart’s not in it; and
• how to tell what to say to keep a rocky working relationship from spiraling out of control.

Women with Emotional Intelligence Often Outperform Men

While the benefits of the above scenarios may seem obvious from an interpersonal standpoint to help reduce stress and improve communications, there is another benefit for women–promotions and salary increases! It’s long been known that good leaders of all genders modulate their responses based on the situation. This kind of situational leadership means that when time is short and the stakes high, for example, the leader can be decisive without needing to bring a lot of people into the decision process (which threaten to bog down the process unnecessarily). That same leader can encourage and stimulate more collaborative, consensus-oriented discussion when there is time and engaging more people in the decision builds consensus and buy-in. Another example of situational leadership might be that when a worker is struggling to learn a new skill the leader can be patient, supportive and non judgmental. In other circumstances where the worker simply isn’t bringing their A game to the office, that same leader might choose to be more judgmental and less patient.

When a single leader demonstrates the ability to use judgement to decide on the most appropriate response in any given situation, they tend to advance in salary, title and responsibility. Impressively, however, in these increases, women outperform men. This means that a woman’s best chance for advancement at work is to master her emotional intelligence and use it to build a wide range of leadership responses to any given situation.

So how do you start refining your emotional intelligence and leveraging it for your leadership skills? Start by paying attention to your emotions and looking for the good information they’re bringing you. Become aware of how they guide you to make decisions and take actions tailored to each situation more effectively. Stop pushing emotions away and start inviting them in for the gifts they bring along with them. If you’re struggling with too many negative emotions, practice detriggering, but keep paying attention to what the good – and bad – feelings are doing to help you. This isn’t a race won by the hare, it’s definitely a race where the tortoise has the advantage. Be patient with others, and with yourself.

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Curious about EQ? Check out the studies cataloged in the InPower Coaching EQ at Work and Soft Skills Research Index.