A few years ago, I set up a daily newspaper called The Self Awareness Daily, via Paper.li, auto-populated from Twitter. It draws from accounts that post about emotional intelligence, self-awareness and leadership news. Today, it shared an article from inc.com presenting ‘6 Emotional Intelligent Skills Your Executive Team Should Possess’. Listed were:
1 Team Building
2 Motivation and Inspiration
3 Self-Awareness and Self-Management
4 Social Intelligence
5 Communication
6 Navigating Differences
All of which I agree with.
I’d like to suggest that another 2 skills should also be added to the list:
7 Systems Thinking
8 Outcomes Focussed
System thinking is really relevant right now, in a time of austerity and cuts, and COVID on top, when sharing knowledge, skills and resources makes the sum of the whole greater than the sum of the parts. You must be sufficiently emotionally intelligence to recognise your impact on others and their impact on you. No human is an island! You need to develop your bigger picture thinking and ability to view your part of the System from above and below. To understand the System, you need to be able to take a helicopter view and zoom in at different times, for different purposes
Being outcomes focussed means that you stop the obsession with outputs and you focus on what difference you’re making. If your output is that 2000 people attended your adult learning class and the outcome is that only 2 of them now have reading skills at grade C at GCSE, have you really achieved what you set out to do? Develop your activities with the outcome in mind. Billions in taxes have been ploughed into the public sector over the years yet the demand for social care, healthcare and policing outstrip capacity on a regular basis. In planning for the future, be empathic: who are you doing this for and what’s the outcome you want for them?