To one degree or another, all faculty have leadership responsibilities, whether that means classroom management, research supervision, or committee leadership. In a presentation given on November 11, 2020, Dr. Helen Park, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Student Affairs in the Roseman College of Pharmacy, talked about the value emotional intelligence can play in being an effective leader.
Dr. Park shared statistics indicating that employees with greater emotional intelligence may achieve better work outcomes, receive higher performance evaluations, and draw a better salary. What’s more, she suggested that emotional intelligence is not a static trait, but one that can be developed by conscious effort.
Drawing on the work of Dennis Goleman, Dr. Park highlighted four, interrelated components that are integral to emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management.
Self-awareness refers to how conscious you are about the feelings you experience and whether you’re honest and accurate in identifying those feelings. It may be tempting to deny having feelings you perceive as being “bad,” but taking a dispassionate inventory of what you feel and what triggered those feelings is essential for being able to constructively manage your own feelings and to accurately identify similar feelings in others.
Self-regulation means intentionally choosing how to act on what you’re feeling. Unthinking actions driven primarily by emotion can result in disaster. Stepping away from an emotional trigger for a while and getting some perspective, perhaps by consulting someone less invested in the situation, can help elicit better outcomes.
Social awareness is related to empathy. It can spring from careful observation and by listening to others, and it is informed by your own self-awareness efforts.
Social awareness can apply not only to your interactions with individuals but with entire groups and organizations as well.
Finally, relationship management involves learning how to manage conflict, build good working relationships, and influence others. These abilities can grow in tandem with your capacity for social awareness and self-regulation.
To conclude the session, Dr. Park suggested several ways we can practice emotional intelligence when interacting with each other virtually. These tips included: turning on your camera to help build connections with others, staying focused on the meeting rather than trying to multi-task, muting your sound when not speaking, and avoiding distracting or negative non-verbal communication.
Please follow this link to view the presentation slides: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AmJVKgt7jNTTh48LJPmXbkQ69_I02g?e=EKljU2
A recording of the presentation can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/G3rDC7hTVmY
If you would like to contribute to The Faculty Development Blog, please contact Tyler Rose at trose@roseman.edu.
Author
Tyler Rose, PhD
Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Roseman University of Health Sciences College of Pharmacy