After this week's readings on emotionally intelligence, I wonder if we are truly developing our leaders effectively with our training if we don't have a class that focuses on this aspect of their personalities and leadership. The other week I posted about our LEAD series of training classes that is made up of Foundational Leadership, Insightful Leadership, and Speaking as a Leader. There is one more class we have on the shelf that we take down every now and then, it's a class on Emotional Intelligence.
The reason it's on the shelf is that our lead facilitator treats it very carefully. He has provided the class to leaders within the oil field industry only a handful of times and each time he does he feels as though the emotions that are brought about, the feelings that rise to the surface, get too raw and things get too powerful for the class. Our facilitator has worked in the oil and gas industry for almost 50 years, as a field tech, a supervisor, an HR analyst and consultant, a trainer and a mediator. He has a depth of knowledge into the industry and the type of people who work in the industry that few people in the industry could hope to have, yet, he has lad leadership development courses for decades yet here is a class that he feels is too raw and inspires too many emotions for the audience.
When I have talked to him about making this class on emotional intelligence a standard offer he demurs and never endorses the idea. He does not undervalue the benefits, he just doesn't feel as though the trainees are up to the task of exploring this side of their nature. I can certainly understand his concerns. Many of our trainees do not come to our leadership classes because they look through a catalog and select our class. Usually, they are sent here by a manager or an administrator. Sometimes they are in trouble and this is part of their corrective action. It could be a part of a career growth plan, but it's rare that organizations willingly spend that type of money on their primary leaders. Chuck's belief is that the trainee should willingly select to explore their emotional intelligence, not be told by their employer that it might be a good class to go to.
For a long time I have agreed with Chuck, but having read (for the second time) Daniel Goleman's article What Makes a Good Leader, I think I might press Chuck again on hosting these classes more often. One passage resonated with me in particular. "Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity. Yet even with maturity, some people still need the training to enhance their emotional intelligence." Our mission is to help improve the safety of the oil and gas industry and part of that is done by developing better leaders. By not focusing on the emotional intelligence of our leaders we are doing them, their organizations, and the industry a disservice.
The same article states, "the higher the rank of a person considered to a be a star performer, the more emotional intelligence capabilities showed up the reason for his or her effectiveness." Just like being able to understand the personality types of the people we may lead (which we develop in Insightful Leadership) or being able to change our leadership style for the type of employee (which we develop in Foundational Leadership) or even being able to present ourselves and talk cogently (Speaking as a Leader), we should be developing the emotional intelligence of our leadership.
There may be some folks who attend our classes because they are told to by their leaders or their training scheduler to come to the class and they are ambushed into raw discussions and emotionally revealing moments, but that potential positive outcomes for the growth of leaders in our community is being marginalized to defray this risk.
GOLEMAN, DANIEL. "What Makes a Leader?" Harvard Business Review, 1998. Accessed 6 June 2020. http://jbedwardsandassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/HBR-What-makes-a-great-leader-D.-Goleman.pdf
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