Every organisation is looking for leaders with strong technical skills to be able to lead teams to get the job done because what you don’t know, you can’t teach! Leaders with high intellectual capabilities and logical reasoning skills (high IQ) are more likely to be successful, right? You may yourself be a functional expert with excellent subject knowledge and technical capabilities. As such, theoretically, you should have no difficulties on the leadership front. Every project should go swimmingly with you setting the pace, and leading from the front, by example.
Sounds like a recipe for success, so why, when you’ve done everything right, do so many setbacks and obstacles manage to creep in? How is it that team members don’t follow your example and do the things that they are supposed to with the same spirit of excellence that you live by?
Well, in a nutshell, a high IQ can enhance problem-solving but without a similarly high EQ to navigate social dynamics and detect where potential difficulties might arise or weaknesses in the team might lie, leadership skills are rendered less effective.
A high EQ (emotional quotient) includes such benefits as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. A high EQ is crucial in any role that requires interpersonal interaction. It will certainly improve teamwork and leadership and become a potent formula to enhance leadership when coupled with a strong IQ for strategic thinking.
Hold on just a minute though! Not everyone is born blessed with this enviable combination of skills or fell into a cauldron of EQ magic potion as a baby! It’s impossible to decide to become emotionally intelligent overnight. It is possible to work on improving those skills, but in the same way that you are naturally wired with a high IQ, you might equally be stuck with a naturally low EQ. So what’s to be done?
It’s about surrounding yourself with the right people.
As a great strategist, you’ll know that good data and the right advice is invaluable. Having the inside track of what is going on helps you to pre-empt problems before they even arise. If social competence is just as valuable for achieving organisational success, and you, the leader, are more technical in your skillset, a great strategy would be to have a trustworthy team member with a high EQ. Someone who has that inside track on where the issues will come from as well as an understanding of people’s behaviour. A consigliere if you like. They know their way around your industry and can tell you who the troublemakers are likely to be or where the landmines are going to be hidden. A team of functional experts will go far, but the help of a consigliere of this kind gives them rocket fuel!
When working in the hazardous environments common to sectors such as engineering, teams must pull together and the quality of each individual’s work contributes to everyone’s safety as well as the overall outcome of the project. Everyone has the right to go home from work at the end of the day so it’s imperative to know who’s doing the work and who’s not doing the work.
This said, within a team, certain kinds of behaviour go unchallenged as leaders aren’t sure how to deal with it. This is not a desirable situation for the aforementioned reasons. Aggressive, abusive behaviour should not be normalised, especially as this kind of behaviour can be used to mask below-par performance to come back at leadership when they are trying to affect necessary change.
All male environments are certainly often categorised as more combative, confrontational and competitive and might be more susceptible to aggressiveness. However, this certainly doesn’t mean that there is no scope to be collaborative. Also, the fact that a leader might still need a little engineering project management coaching when it comes to dealing with difficult team members does not have to be a major factor in project failure. The bottom line is, if you don’t have it yourself – you can put someone on the team who has it! The consigliere!
The consigliere recognises that, within each team, people are motivated differently, some respond better to carrots and others to sticks. They have the emotional intelligence to understand what makes people tick and successfully manage emotions and social interactions and this can be the extra fuel required to get a project delivered successfully.
Delivering successful project management for engineering projects is our core business at Coron. We have years of experience in the industry and our engineering project management coaching can offer you the inside track! You’ll have a consigliere to help you with sector-specific advice to motivate your team and “take care of business” (in a positive way of course).
