Emotional Intelligence: A Step on the Path to Developing “People First” Leaders

By: Taylor Freitas

What does a “People First” Army look like? Senior leadership envision it as “investing resources in our people… An organization that is truly inclusive where everyone feels like a valued member of the team.”[1] Our duty as leaders requires us to find ways to translate that guidance into action for our own formations, and I believe this equates to laying a bedrock of trust through compassion. The first step on the path to creating a “People First” Army is to gain the confidence of those we lead through competence, character, and genuine care for our subordinates’ well-being.[2] The trust we gain through these actions will enable engagement strategies such as “This is My Squad” to be effective at forming positive relationships with our Soldiers.[3] Organizational trust directly raises team cohesion and team satisfaction, which in turn conclusively increase team effectiveness.[4,5] If your Soldiers trust you, they will be more inclined to open up about their personal joys and sorrows; conversely, a lack of trust breeds isolation which prevents these encounters from ever making a meaningful impact.[6] The positive interactions that a foundation of trust enables can make those you lead feel appreciated and, ultimately, move your organization closer to the ultimate end state of the “People First” initiative — a more cohesive (and effective) team. While competence and character are essential in building the trust required, I’d like to focus on the “genuine care” component I mentioned earlier. Demonstrating genuine care can take many forms, but I submit that to create the close-knit teams the Army’s “People First” focus envisions, young officers and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) must learn how to become approachable and to connect with those they lead.[7] One way to embody the goal of genuine Soldier care is by developing emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is one of the most vital assets available to Army leaders; however, its cultivation often takes a backburner to other elements like physical training (PT) and doctrinal knowledge (the “competence” element of fostering trust).[8] While these latter skills are important, they fail to ground officers in the Army’s greatest strength — its people. Numerous studies have shown a positive correlation between EI and group cohesion, demonstrating the key benefits offered to units.[9,10] EI proficiency is a powerful tool that enables a deeper control of oneself, and if used for good, can permeate genuine care for others by fostering a positive environment across an organization.[11] Therefore, if junior officers take the time to develop their EI, they can cultivate the trust necessary to create cohesive teams and become the “People First” leaders our Soldiers deserve.

What is Emotional Intelligence

By now, most people have heard of EI and have a vague understanding that it is the feelings-based version of the traditional intelligence quotient (IQ). However, what does that actually mean? One conceptualization of EI comprises four individual components: two internal, two external.[12]

• Self-Awareness (Internal). Arguably the most important aspect of EI is the ability to correctly label our emotions and recognize how they influence our actions. This serves as a basis for other components to follow.
• Self-Management (Internal). Once we identify emotions, we can then work to control them. This is primarily concerned with negative natural tendencies that can spiral out of control if allowed to and focuses on regulating them to produce healthier versions.
• Social Awareness (External). This is the ability to accurately understand and interpret the emotional responses of others to situations in their life, including the impact our actions have on their state of mind. It is akin to our ability to empathize with the emotions of others.
• Relationship Management (External). Your strength here lies in your mastery of the previous basics. If you are under control and compassionate towards others, you can bring together disparate groups of individuals and influence them towards common mission objectives.

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence

Now that we have an understanding of the four components of EI, the natural follow-up question is how to improve it. First, you must develop your self-awareness, as it is the key to further EI progression. You can grow through moments of self-reflection across your day and should make a habit of correctly identifying your emotions and natural responses across various situations. One key takeaway is that just because you have certain emotions, you are not obligated to act them out. Introspection must also be deliberate because it also possesses potential pitfalls.[13] Be careful to not become trapped in the “why” behind your feelings and instead focus on the “what.” For example, we all can experience anger in our lives caused by a plethora of reasons. We occasionally spend too much time trying to determine the primary cause of our reaction because definitive answers are hard to acquire. You may not be able to prevent the emotions from happening, but you can always utilize your self-management to decide what you will do when they manifest. High levels of emotive control will allow you to treat every subordinate with respect and compassion, even if their actions initially set your emotions afire, and this consistency will cultivate their trust in you.

When dealing with something as complex as emotions, it is difficult to have all the answers ourselves; we often require an outside perspective to improve our overlooked areas. An effective way to measure your self-awareness is to compare your self-opinion to how others see you.[14] Invite those you trust at every level to provide candid feedback and identify potential areas of disconnect. Return to earlier steps and work to bridge the difference. This will lead to a process of continual refinement and can develop you into the person you want to be. Nevertheless, traditional feedback usually has a negative connotation associated with it and recipients oftentimes ignore it from hurt feelings, especially if they are unable to separate their professional life from their personal one. In contrast, feedforward provides an alternative solution that focuses on ways to achieve future goals without mentioning past performance that leaves beneficiaries happy and willing to adapt their received recommendations.[15] The strength behind this method is that it changes feedback into impersonal advice regarding our targeted goals. Try asking those in the workplace for tips on how to accomplish a specific leadership goal you have and just listen to what they have to say. Accepting this advice will be key to improving yourself and your EI.

Self-awareness connects us to who we are as leaders. While assimilation to the Army culture is inevitable due to our participation as a member of that culture, we should not ignore the importance of our other identities in the process. Authenticity is essential to individual well-being, and when in leadership positions, this extends to those under you. If you pretend to be someone else, burnout will soon follow. Worse, you could even lose yourself behind the mask you thought required to succeed, and you become forced to balance your authentic self and your “mask of success.” This creates emotional inconsistency due to the struggle to balance our two personas. Rank, experience, and even your commissioning source make self-awareness more difficult.[16] These distractions take away from your ability to connect with your natural self on an emotional level. In turn, this disconnect hurts your ability to offer genuine care for subordinates because you are unable to first show it towards yourself. Self-awareness allows you to employ your strengths while acknowledging your weaknesses, ultimately giving you the confidence to continually refine your own unique leadership style and provide consistency that engenders trust, ultimately leading to a perception of genuine care within your formation.

Once you have established a strong foundation of self-awareness and self-regulation, you can focus more time and attention on enhancing your external abilities. You can do this in numerous ways. The most obvious would be to utilize active listening in your daily conversations.[17] Here you can exercise your social awareness, try to notice how the other person is feeling, and practice your empathy. Empathy is also critical in emotional regulation through the empathy jolt, which limits feelings of anger when an individual seeks to understand the perspective of others.[18] A more subtle way to develop this skill is to read literature heavy in nuanced characters (see works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo). You will gain a deeper understanding of others when placed in their own narrative. Just because they may be fictional, it doesn’t mean that their experience is any less real. Our Soldiers reflect the wide diversity of America and you will likely work with people who possess far different backgrounds than you are familiar with. These skills will directly aid you in communicating within a diverse organization and allow for meaningful engagements that can eventually result in cohesive teams.

Master Yourself

Simply having high EI is not a guarantee of success in creating a “People First” Army. Like any skill, it is capable of misuse. In itself, EI as with IQ, is just a powerful toolset that leaders can apply for benevolent and malicious purposes. [19] High EI in an undisciplined individual can manifest in the manipulation of others and turn an organization against itself, producing even greater harm than that of an apathetic leader.[20] Power of any kind has the ability to corrupt the best of us and we must attempt to counter its effects. Immerse yourself in the Army Values (loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage) to help guide your inner decision-making process. Surround yourself with good people inside and outside of work so they can predispose you to their ways and provide feedback when needed. When you solidify yourself in moral foundations, you can then use EI for the authentic betterment of others instead of for selfish gain. This altruïsm is a requisite for Soldiers’ trust and will create the cohesive teams that the Army needs.

Build your Cohesive Team

You likely remember by now that EI allows you to display genuine care for your Soldiers, which earns the trust that creates a cohesive team — the route to success is lucidly defined, but how will you go about it? The Army will provide you plenty of opportunities to practice your emotional intelligence and realize “People First” throughout your own unique formation. You can solve every different challenge through the resolute implementation of EI over time. Stress will always be a part of the job and it is vital you learn how to manage it. The key is to not let stress dictate your actions, but instead to develop resiliency based on self-management. Be the leader who pauses when needed and reflects on the day or unwinds during lunch. Take a few seconds before acting rashly in moments of high stress and talk things over with your NCO counterpart or a peer. Talk to all Soldiers, regardless of rank, with sincere concern for their lives and establish an enduring trust. Use this to create a team that wants to be there instead of one that has to be there. A leader’s example provides extensive influence over his or her unit and everyone is watching. Set the standard of what positive utilization of EI looks like by developing it within yourself and living it through your actions.

Additionally, you can further reinforce EI by rewarding Soldiers who exhibit it to solve problems and accomplish the mission. The Army has an award for just about everything, ranging from physical training badges, to a ribbon for community service. This approach incentivizes service members to accomplish Army goals and you can apply this to promote EI. While EI proficiency is harder to measure than a PT score, it is noticeable in day-to-day interactions. This is especially true during trying field problems or deployments when it’s easy to become frustrated. When faced with these circumstances, low EI Soldiers tend to break down emotionally and spread a negative influence, while high EI Soldiers typically display resiliency and remain team players. Leaders can submit these emotionally intelligent Soldiers in for an impact award and should incorporate EI into performance evaluations. Recognizing those who display positive EI will establish a clear message of what type of skillset you value and it will quickly spread to others, producing a compounding ripple effect across your formation. An EI-savvy unit will exude trust and radiate positivity; this is what a unified team looks like.

In applicable circumstances, you can also engage with toxic individuals to create the environment you want to work in.[21] Soldiers often only remain toxic because they critically lack EI, specifically, self-awareness — they don’t realize that they are the problem. Sometimes the positive influence you promote doesn’t take root how you wanted and you’ll need to be more direct. If an individual is exhibiting toxic behavior, you must speak with them on behalf of the organization or suffer the effects of a lasting enmity that prevents trust and a unified organization from ever emerging. Mentor subordinates through counseling sessions. Talk directly to a peer over lunch. Gather a quorum of officers together to address to your superior. These are challenging tasks, but always remember that your job is to take care of Soldiers and foster a tight-knit unit that can accomplish the mission — don’t lose courage and forget it.

The Way Ahead

There have been numerous calls to action over the past decades regarding the need for the Army to train its Soldiers in emotional intelligence; however, while partially present in doctrine, it has yet to be fully embraced and enacted.[22] FM 6–22, Leader Development, should be rife with references to EI considering how useful of a tool it can be for leaders to engage with their subordinates.[11] There are references to the importance of resiliency and empathy, both of which are vital to successful mastery of EI, but they are simply parts of an unmentioned greater whole. One of the best ways to enforce difficult change in the Army is to enact it from the top down; therefore, the entirety of EI as discussed in this article should take its place in doctrine for organization-wide implementation to happen. Until this occurs, leaders should continue their self-development and encourage EI growth from the bottom up.

Conclusion

Junior leaders can utilize emotional intelligence to better themselves, their Soldiers, and the Army as a whole. In the end, EI provides leaders the skills needed to genuinely care for their subordinates, promote trust, and form cohesive teams that invest in and value their people. “People First” must be more than a slogan for us. Emotional intelligence provides a concrete solution that if correctly prioritized and altruistically implemented, can help manifest the positive change we need in our formations.

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Captain Taylor Freitas is currently a student in the Military Intelligence Captain’s Career Course. He was commissioned through ROTC as a Military Intelligence Officer and is a 2017 graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles. His first assignment to 1st Armored Division, Fort Bliss, showed him the importance of emotional intelligence in the Army and helped develop him into the officer that he is today.

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[1] Matthews, M. D. (2016, May 3). The 3 C’s of Trust. Psychology Today. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/head-strong/201605/the-3-c-s-trust

[2] Rempfer, K. (2019, October 17). ‘This is my squad’: SMA Grinston talks about his push to build cohesive units. Army Times. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/10/17/this-is-my-squad-sma-grinston-talks- about-his-push-to-build-cohesive-units/

[3] Fung, H.-P. (2014). Relationships among team trust, team cohesion, team satisfaction and project team effectiveness as perceived by project managers in Malaysia. International Journal of Business, Economics and Management, 1(1), 1–15. http://www.conscientiabeam.com/pdffiles/eco/62/ijbem-2014-1(1)-1-15.pdf

[4] Seppälä, E. (2015, March 18). Positive teams are more productive. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2015/03/positive-teams-are-more-productive?registration=success

[5] Jaffe, D. (2018, December 5). The essential importance of trust: how to build it or restore it. Forbes. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/dennisjaffe/2018/12/05/the-essential-importance-of-trust-how-to- build-it-or-restore-it/?sh=6f7679d064fe

[6] Kadel, J. (2019, November 17). Building trust: 8 ways to become a more approachable leader. The Field Grade Leader. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from http://fieldgradeleader.themilitaryleader.com/approachable/

[7] Landry, L. (2019, April 3). Why Emotional Intelligence is Important in Leadership. Harvard Business School Online. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/emotional-intelligence-in-leadership

[8] Moore, A. & Mamiseishvili, K. (2012) Examining the Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Group Cohesion. Journal of Education for Business, 87:5, 296302, DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2011.623197

[9] Black, J., Kim, K., Rhee, S., Wang, K. and Sakchutchawan, S. (2019), Self-efficacy and emotional intelligence: Influencing team cohesion to enhance team performance, Team Performance Management, Vol. 25 №1/2, pp. 100–119. https://doi.org/10.1108/TPM-01-2018-0005

[10] Thompkins, S. (2020, June 25). Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Effectiveness: Bringing Out the Best. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/emotional-intelligence-and-leadership-effectiveness/

[11] How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence. (2019, August 26). Harvard Professional Development. Retrieved August 29, 2021, from https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-improve-your-emotional-intelligence/

[12] Eurich, T. (2018, January 4). What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved August 29, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it

[13] Goleman, D., & Boyatzis, R. E. (2017, February 6). Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On? Harvard Business Review. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2017/02/ emotional-intelligence-has-12-elements-which-do-you-need-to-work-on

[14] Goldsmith, M. (2015, October 29). Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback. Marshall Goldsmith. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://www.marshallgoldsmith.com/articles/try-feedforward-instead-feedback/

[15] Swain, J., & Watson, J. (n.d.). West Point Lieutenants Lack Self-Awareness. Center for Junior Officers. Retrieved August 29, 2021, from https://juniorofficer.army.mil/west-point-self-awareness/

[16] Grande, D. (n.d.). Active Listening Skills. Psychology Today. Retrieved August 29, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-it-together/202006/active-listening-skills

[17] Thompson, V. (2009, September 23). The Empathy Jolt. ZD Net. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-empathy-jolt/

[18] Marsh, J. (2011, June 9). The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence. Greater Good Magazine. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/ the_dark_side_of _emotional _intelligence

[19] Grant, A. (2014, January 2). The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence. The Atlantic. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-dark-side-of-emotional-intelligence/282720/

[20] Silk, J. (n.d.). Emotional Intelligence…Leading Self. Center for Junior Officers. Retrieved August 29, 2021, from https://juniorofficer.army.mil/emotional-intelligenceleading-self/

[21] Sewell, G. F. (2009). Emotional Intelligence and the Army Leadership Requirements Model [PDF]. Military Review, 93–98. https://usacac.army.mil/sites/default/files/documents/cace/DCL/ DCL_SewellEngNovDec09.pdf

[22] U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 6–22, Army Leadership (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], June 2015.)