A leader has a difficult but important job: leading a team of unique individuals to follow a single vision and to motivate them to work collaboratively toward a common goal. Not all leaders can do this effectively.
Why do some leaders succeed while others fail?
Although there are some exceptions, most great leaders succeed because they have a high degree of emotional intelligence.
Mariah DeLeon, in her article “The Importance of Emotional Intelligence at Work” writes:
…it’s vital for managers and other business leaders to operate in emotionally intelligent ways to meet the needs of today’s workers.
Jeff Immelt, the widely respected CEO of General Electric, agrees:
Leadership is an intense journey into yourself. You can use your own style to get anything done. It’s about being self-aware. Every morning, I look in the
mirror and say, ‘I could have done three things better yesterday.’
Emotional intelligence (sometimes also called EI or EQ) is the ability to identify and regulate your own feelings, and the feelings of people around you. Leadership coach Brent Gleeson describes it as:

The act of knowing, understanding, and responding to emotions, overcoming stress in the moment, and being aware of how your words and actions affect others…
EQ is incredibly important in the workplace – even more important than the traditional measure of intelligence – IQ. It turns out that people with a high EQ are better teammates and better leaders than people with a high IQ.
Emotional intelligence experts at TalentSmart tested a host of 33 variables to determine which had the greatest impact on workplace success. Emotional intelligence was the strongest predictor of performance, accounting for 58% o
person’s job performance.

TalentSmart president Travis Bradberry points out,
Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills—it impacts most everything you do and say each day.
Contrary to conventional thinking, there’s not one common type of emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman, the author of the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, breaks EQ down into 4 components:
• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Empathy
• Relationship management
Goleman also reveals that EQ (unlike IQ) is a skill that can be learned and improved.
Let’s take a deeper look into each of the four pillars of emotional intelligence to discover how you can become a better leader.